Senior DevOps Platform Engineer
Manchester, UK| Hybrid |Full-time
Contract: Inside IR35
Banking Domain Preferred
Skills:
Kubernetes/OpenShift engineering, Terraform, Backstage/IDP, continuous delivery, observability (inc. metrics/telemetry/SLO/run book automation), platform engineering, control engineering
ROLE PURPOSE Build and evolve secure, resilient cloud platforms and delivery capabilities that enable engineering teams to release software faster, safely and consistently. This is a hands-on role spanning Kubernetes engineering, infrastructure automation, continuous delivery, observability and platform controls.
What you will do
- Design, build and operate enterprise Kubernetes platforms using GKE and OpenShift, including cluster lifecycle, networking, ingress and workload security.
- Create reusable platform services, golden paths and developer self-service capabilities through Backstage and Internal Developer Platform patterns.
- Build secure, repeatable cloud environments and reusable modules using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code principles.
- Design and maintain continuous delivery pipelines using Harness and Jenkins, with source control and collaboration through GitHub / Git.
- Implement end-to-end observability using Dynatrace, covering metrics, logs, traces, telemetry, dashboards, alerting and service health.
- Define SLI/SLO measures and automate operational runbooks, remediation and repeatable support activities to reduce manual effort.
- Engineer service-to-service connectivity and controls using Istio Service Mesh, including traffic management, ingress/egress and policy enforcement.
- Manage secrets, certificates and workload identity securely using HashiCorp Vault and automated certificate lifecycle practices.
- Embed platform controls, least-privilege access, secure configuration, resilience and auditability into engineering patterns.
- Partner with product, engineering, architecture, security and operations teams; coach colleagues and promote platform adoption and engineering standards.
Essential skills and experience
Capability
Required experience
Container platforms
- Strong hands-on Kubernetes engineering; GKE preferred. OpenShift experience is required.
Cloud & IaC
- Google Cloud Platform experience preferred; strong Terraform and reusable infrastructure automation.
Delivery engineering
- Harness CI/CD and Jenkins; pipeline design, automation, release controls and deployment patterns.
Developer platform
- Backstage and Internal Developer Platform concepts, including self-service and golden paths.
Observability & SRE
- Dynatrace; metrics, telemetry, logs, traces, alerting, SLI/SLO practices and runbook automation.
Security & controls
- HashiCorp Vault, certificate management, IAM/least privilege, platform controls and secure configuration.
Networking
- Istio Service Mesh, ingress/egress, service connectivity, traffic management and network security concepts.
Engineering practices
- GitHub / Git, automation-first mindset, scripting, troubleshooting and production support.
Desirable
- Experience operating platforms within a large, regulated enterprise environment.
- Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments.
- Good working knowledge of Bash, Python or PowerShell automation.
- Understanding of reliability engineering, incident management, capacity, resilience and cost telemetry.
- What success looks like
- Secure, supportable and repeatable platform services with clear engineering standards and controls.
- Faster, safer delivery through automation, reusable patterns and an improved developer experience.
- Improved service reliability through measurable SLOs, actionable observability and automated operations.