Interim Principal Platform Engineer

Go Fractional; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 143,000; Full time

Job summary

Medtronic Digital Technologies is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer for a 12-month fixed-term contract in London, with a hybrid work arrangement requiring 2-3 days on-site per week. The role focuses on building and maintaining critical software engineering tools and IaC-driven infrastructure to improve efficiency, reliability, and observability.

You will collaborate with multiple software groups to design pragmatic, scalable solutions, guide DevOps practices, and mentor peers while

Qualifications

• 6+ years in platform engineering, DevOps or SRE.
• Experience with IaC tools (OpenTofu, EKS, Helm).
• Production-ready distributed systems experience; trade-offs on performance and reliability.
• Cloud proficiency (AWS), databases, APIs, modern DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Enhance and maintain Infrastructure as Code repository for cloud resources.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines; automate processes.
• Provide observability tools for self-discovery of issues.
• Identify productivity gaps and implement solutions.
• Provide technical mentorship inside and outside the team.

Skills

Platform engineering

DevOps

Site reliability

IaC OpenTofu

AWS

Python

CI/CD

Observability

Tools

OpenTofu

EKS

Helm

Job description

Principal Platform Engineer - 12-Month Fixed-Term Contract

Work Arrangement: Flexible Work Arrangement (must commute to London 2-3 days per week)

Location: London, London, United Kingdom

Employment Type: Full time

Job Requisition ID: R77992

A Day in the Life

Medtronic Digital Technologies is creating ambitious new products that bring connectivity, real-time guidance, and decision support to the operating room. To support this mission, we are developing compact, high-performance, embedded systems that enable edge computing and connectivity. Working closely with other teams across Medtronic, we are creating a connected ecosystem and leveraging the state of the art in computer vision to provide the most comprehensive view of surgery.

This role is focused on developing and maintaining critical software engineering tools and architecture to drive engineering efficiency, reliability, and continuous improvement. The responsibilities will be diverse, ranging from maintaining AWS resources through Infrastructure as Code (we use OpenTofu) through to enhancing observability tools (we embrace OpenTelemetry) and supporting AI agentic workflows. You will be working with different software engineering groups to understand their problems and coming up with a pragmatic, maintainable solution to solve their problems.

Primary Responsibilities

• Enhance and maintain our Infrastructure as Code repository to give all our engineers the best cloud resource support.
• Contribute to our CI/CD pipelines to driver further efficiency of our engineers – automate everything where possible.
• Provide observability tools to engineers so they can self-discover issues.
• Find gaps in developer productivity and design, implement solutions to solve them.
• Provide technical mentorship to others, inside and outside of the team.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of platform engineering, DevOps, or site reliability engineering experience, working with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools – we use OpenTofu, EKS and Helm.
• Track record of successfully navigating ambiguity, including making progress with incomplete information, breaking down complex problems, and adapting approach as requirements evolve.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production, with solid understanding of architectural trade-offs involving performance, scalability, and reliability
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), databases, APIs, and modern DevOps practice.
• Must be willing to commute to London 2-3 days per week, with flexibility around the exact arrangement.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with designing golden paths for internal software engineers - internal developer platforms, developer experience products.
• Experience with Python - when we cannot leverage IaC our code is Python based.
• Experience with deploying production GitOps platforms that manage deployments of multiple applications effectively.
• Familiarity with Governance, Risk , and Compliance (GRC) engineering – platform engineering means we have a duty to address our security and compliance issues through automated means.
• Experience with Agentic AI infrastructure - you have built an AI coding agent that goes beyond markdown files on an IDE.

Compensation

Pay Range: United Kingdom: 95,200.00 GBP - 142,800.00 GBP

This position is eligible for a short-term incentive called the Medtronic Incentive Plan (MIP).