Skills

Leadership TypeScript CI/CD Kubernetes Stakeholder Management react AWS Strategic Planning Prometheus Grafana

Job Specifications

Lead AWS Platform Engineer - Must be comfortable with mentoring/management responsibilities

Hybrid - Leeds city centre (free parking)

Role Summary

The Lead Platform Engineer will provide strategic technical leadership for the cloud-native initiatives. You will establish architectural standards and operational practices to enable scalable SaaS delivery, driving developer experience through self-service platforms, GitOps workflows, and robust observability.

You will lead and mentor a team of engineers, balancing strategic planning with hands-on execution to ensure high reliability and security in data-sensitive environments.

Main Responsibilities

Leadership & Strategy

Define and drive the vision, strategy, and roadmap for platform engineering.
Mentor technical talent and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration.
Manage team capacity, balancing new features with technical debt and operational excellence.
Collaborate with stakeholders to drive organizational adoption of platform initiatives.

Technical Execution

Architect self-service capabilities (e.g., Backstage) and GitOps workflows (e.g., ArgoCD).
Own production SaaS reliability, managing multi-cluster Kubernetes environments and AWS infrastructure.
Implement DORA and Core 4 metrics to drive continuous improvement.
Establish standards for CI/CD, containerization, and security (RBAC, disaster recovery).
Maintain the observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana) and define SLIs/SLOs.

Collaboration & Improvement

Partner with Security and Product teams to ensure compliance and meet customer needs.
Eliminate toil through automation and optimize infrastructure costs.
Lead the platform "Community of Practice" and document key architectural decisions.

Skills and Knowledge

Essential

Experience: 5+ years designing cloud infrastructure and owning production SaaS platforms.
Orchestration: Expert-level Kubernetes (multi-cluster management and resource optimization).
Deployment: Hands-on GitOps experience using ArgoCD and Helm.
Tooling: Proficiency in IaC ($Terraform$, $CDK$, or $Ansible$) and observability platforms.
Security: Understanding of security standards in high-value data environments.
Soft Skills: Strong stakeholder management and ability to influence across teams.

Desired

AWS or Kubernetes certifications.
Experience implementing DORA/Core 4 metrics.
TypeScript/React skills for portal customization.

Key Benefits

Competitive Package
Work-Life Balance: 34 days holiday (plus bank holidays).
Perks: Generous pension, healthcare cashback, and more.