Principal Platform Engineer
Safeguard Global
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: United Kingdom
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Job Level
About the role
- Lead a team of Platform Engineers and collaborate across Engineering, Security, Architecture, Data, and Product to shape and deliver key platform outcomes.
- Treat internal engineers as users, build self-service workflows, and drive measurable improvements in speed, reliability, security, and efficiency.
- Empower teams to leverage LLMs and AI-assisted tooling across the software delivery lifecycle, boosting throughput and quality while embedding security, privacy, auditability, and cost controls by default.
- Own the Internal Developer Platform roadmap and align priorities with Engineering leadership, Security, and Architecture.
- Build and maintain paved roads (golden paths) that standardise how teams deliver services (APIs, event consumers, scheduled jobs, data pipelines).
- Reduce developer friction by increasing self-service for common needs (service scaffolding, CI/CD, environments, secrets, access, observability).
- Establish platform OKRs and measure outcomes (cycle time consistency, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR, developer satisfaction).
- Improve CI/CD patterns and tooling (quality gates, progressive delivery, automated rollbacks, standard checks).
- Embed security and compliance into workflows using policy-as-code and secure defaults.
- Strengthen software supply chain controls (dependency scanning, SBOM/provenance, SAST/DAST, secret scanning, container/image scanning).
- Define and operationalise standards for observability (logs, metrics, traces), alerting, dashboards and runbooks.
- Partner with service teams to adopt SLIs/SLOs and error budgets in a way that supports both speed and reliability.
- Build scalable, resilient patterns into templates and reference implementations.
- Drive cost visibility and guardrails (FinOps) for platform components, shared services, and AI usage.
- Enable teams to adopt AI-assisted workflows across the SDLC and run-the-line (for example: coding support, code review assistance, test generation, documentation, release readiness, incident support).
- Provide approved patterns and tooling for safe usage (for example: internal knowledge search over documentation, runbook assistants, codebase Q&A, deployment helpers).
- Implement guardrails and governance: access controls, audit logging, data boundaries, PII handling, evaluation and prompt/version management, and cost controls.
- Measure adoption and impact and iterate based on evidence (productivity, quality, reliability and cost).
Requirements
- Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams, including coaching and hiring.
- Strong background in distributed systems and cloud-native architecture, especially on AWS.
- Hands-on experience building developer platforms or self-service tooling.
- Deep knowledge of CI/CD, release engineering, and automated quality gates.
- Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and environment automation.
- Solid understanding of observability, reliability, and incident response practices.
- Experience with modern service frameworks and Node.js/TypeScript platforms.
- Familiarity with AWS-native infrastructure tooling like SST and event-driven architectures.
- Knowledge of access control, identity integration, and fine-grained authorisation patterns.
- Experience enabling governed data usage for analytics and AI, including privacy and compliance controls.
- Practical experience with AI/LLM enablement, including governance, auditing, and cost management.
- A product-minded approach—optimising platforms for adoption, usability, and measurable outcomes.
- Track record of balancing high standards for security and reliability with pragmatic delivery.
Benefits
- Autonomy and Flexibility (work in any way): Remote first, with the flexibility to include life needs like school runs and gym breaks in your schedule , all while maintaining a high standard of work.
- Generous leave: Enjoy a competitive leave package including paid bonding leaves for new additions to your family
- Make a difference: Get 2 paid charitable days off to contribute to causes you believe in
- Corporate bonus/SIP: All Guardians are eligible for our annual bonus scheme or sales incentive plan.
- International environment: Grow your network internationally and collaborate across the world. Interact, discover cultures, and tap into local expertise .
- Human centered culture: We emphasize the people factor in everything we do. Our nurturing culture ensures your ideas reach our leaders and your contributions get the recognition they deserve.
- Learning: We support your continuous growth by providing access to 2 learning platforms, where you can learn at your own pace.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
distributed systemscloud-native architectureAWSCI/CDrelease engineeringInfrastructure as CodeTerraformPulumiCloudFormationobservability
Soft Skills
leadershipcoachinghiringproduct-minded approachoptimizing platformsbalancing security and reliabilitycollaborationempowermentcommunicationiteration based on evidence