Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

You will own the design, delivery, and operation of complex digital platforms that underpin high-value client outcomes in demanding, multi-team environments. This role requires deep hands-on expertise to build and sustain resilient, secure, and scalable infrastructure foundations. You will act as a trusted technical authority, shaping technology direction through strategic influence and direct engagement with clients and leadership. Your day-to-day will involve mentoring engineers, elevating technical standards, and ensuring that delivery teams can operate autonomously with confidence. You will champion pragmatic innovation, leveraging emerging tools and industry best practices to simplify complexity and accelerate value. Thought leadership will be demonstrated not only in code but also in advising clients and representing Red Badger in high-stakes conversations with clarity and precision.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and evolve robust platform foundations that enable rapid, reliable delivery while minimising operational burden for distributed teams.
• Translate ambiguous client and business needs into concrete technical strategies, ensuring alignment between technology choices, product goals, and Red Badger value propositions.
• Lead the design of containerised, cloud-native solutions on AWS, defining infrastructure-as-code patterns and progressive management approaches for long-term agility.
• Implement and govern GitOps-driven continuous delivery pipelines, evaluating trade-offs between pipelines-as-code, monorepos, branching strategies, and release orchestration.
• Embed security and compliance early through advocacy for tools like Kyverno, Istio, and informed handling of regulations such as PCI and GDPR.
• Establish observability baselines using Prometheus and OTEL, enabling data-driven decisions and proactive system health management.
• Mentor and upskill Red Badger engineers in modern container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS), elevating the overall technical capability of delivery teams.
• Guide selection and integration of data storage technologies, weighing relational, key-value, columnar, and log-based stores against evolving requirements.
• Drive the adoption of infrastructure automation using Terraform, ensuring consistency, auditability, and scalability across multi-account and multi-stage environments.
• Contribute to technology governance at the account and programme level, aligning Badger and client teams on standards, tooling, and ways of working.
• Operate as a hands-on practitioner, writing, reviewing, and pairing on code to demonstrate solutions and resolve complex technical impediments.
• Influence client stakeholders as a trusted advisor, coaching senior technical leaders on roadmap decisions and emerging technology opportunities.
• Lead or support multiple concurrent technology streams, coordinating delivery strategies across teams to maximise autonomy and impact.
• Promote simplicity in design and tool choice, reducing cognitive load and maintenance overhead for future operating models.

Requirements

• You hold a deep, hands-on understanding of software delivery, platform engineering, and solution design within complex client landscapes.
• You demonstrate extensive, current experience with AWS cloud platforms and progressive infrastructure management techniques rooted in infrastructure-as-code.
• You possess strong expertise in container and image management, with proven ability to design and operate Kubernetes workloads at scale using EKS and Docker.
• You have a track record of designing, implementing, and improving modern CI/CD pipelines, including fluency in pipelines-as-code, monorepo patterns, GitOps, and strategic branching and release approaches.
• You are fluent in infrastructure automation using Terraform and experienced in building, testing, and maintaining reusable platform modules.
• You show mastery of observability and monitoring concepts, having implemented solutions using Prometheus and OTEL to surface meaningful service and platform metrics.
• You bring advanced knowledge of container orchestration security, including policy enforcement with tools such as Kyverno and service mesh patterns with Istio.
• You understand information security holistically, recognising common attack vectors and the implications of regulations like PCI and GDPR for technology decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience with the following tools and technologies: Terraform, FLUX, Kyverno, Istio, Github Actions, Prometheus/OTEL, AWS, Docker, K8s/EKS, modern CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, cryptography (e.g. TLS, PKI).
• Experience in designing and testing strategies that enable gradual evolution of systems over time.
• Good understanding of data storage approaches and trade-offs involving RDBMS, key-value stores, column stores, and log storage.
• Understanding of cryptography in software development, including TLS and PKI.

Practical notes

• Hours, travel, visa, or deadlines are defined in the source document and are not detailed here.