Senior Platform Engineering Lead

The role operates across:

• AWS cloud platforms and landing zones
• GitLab CI/CD and DevSecOps tooling
• Backstage Developer Portal
• Kubernetes and container platforms
• Infrastructure as Code platforms
• Observability platforms (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Grafana)
• Identity and Access Management platforms
• API and Integration platforms
• Shared engineering services and platform products
• Enterprise architecture standards and technology roadmaps

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering or relateddiscipline.
• 10+ years experience across software engineering, cloud engineering, platform engineering or architecture.
• 3+ years experience in a senior platform architecture or platform engineering leadership role.
• Experience building and operating enterprise-scale cloud platforms.
• Experience defining platform standards and engineering guardrails.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives.

Preferred

• Financial Services or Insurance industry experience.
• AWS certifications.

Duties & Responsibilities

Platform Strategy and Roadmap

• Define and maintain the platform capability model.
• Develop platform target architectures and roadmaps.
• Identify technology opportunities and platform improvements.
• Guide long-term platform investment decisions.
• Support enterprise modernisation initiatives.

Outputs

• Platform strategy
• Platform roadmaps
• Platform capability maps
• Technology lifecycle plans
• Platform investment recommendations

Developer Experience

• Improve developer productivity through platform capabilities.
• Promote self-service engineering practices.
• Lead Backstage adoption and evolution.
• Support reusable engineering templates and golden paths.

Outputs

• Platform onboarding journeys
• Backstage catalog structures
• Self-service capabilities
• Engineering accelerators
• Golden path guidance

Platform Guardrails

Define measurable platform guardrails covering:

• Security
• Operational supportability
• Deployability
• Observability
• Resilience
• Compliance
• Cost management

Focus on automated enforcement wherever possible.

Outputs

• Platform guardrails
• Policy-as-Code controls
• Compliance dashboards
• Conformance scorecards
• Platform standards

Technical Leadership

• Provide architectural guidance to Platform Engineers.
• Facilitate technical decision-making.
• Mentor technical leads and engineers.
• Lead platform architecture communities and forums.
• Resolve cross-platform architectural concerns.

Outputs

• Platform Architecture reviews
• Technical coaching
• Platform engineering guidance
• Community of practice leadership

Operational Excellence

• Partner with Production Engineering and SRE teams.
• Improve platform resilience and operability.
• Ensure observability standards are implemented.
• Reduce operational toil through automation.

Outputs

• Reliability improvements
• Operational readiness standards
• Platform telemetry standards
• Recovery and resilience designs

Key Accountabilities

The role is accountable for:

• Platform architecture strategy
• Platform product ownership models
• Platform guardrails and standards
• Platform reference architectures
• Cloud platform architectures
• Developer platform architecture
• Platform lifecycle management
• Platform engineering technical leadership
• Platform capability adoption
• Platform reliability and resilience
• The role is not accountable for business solution architecture delivery.

Competencies

• Platform product management
• Cloud architecture
• Systems thinking
• Architecture leadership
• Engineering enablement
• Platform governance
• Stakeholder management
• Cost optimisation
• Security enablement
• DevOps and Platform Engineering practices