Lead Platform Engineer

Parkingeye Limited; Chorley; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Parkingeye Limited is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to drive our Azure cloud and hybrid environment strategy from our UK base. You will own AKS/Kubernetes, network design, and security, while mentoring a team of engineers and collaborating with IT, software, and product stakeholders.

You will implement IaC and CI/CD with Terraform and Azure DevOps, and oversee monitoring via DataDog and AppInsights to ensure reliable, secure platforms. Strong leadership and communication are essential.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating Azure cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on with AKS/Kubernetes upgrades and security.
• Strong CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code experience.
• Ability to lead a platform engineering team.
• Experience with DataDog and AppInsights for monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, operation and continuous improvement of our Azure cloud and hybrid environments.
• Own and manage AKS/Kubernetes environments, including upgrades, scaling, security and reliability.
• Design and maintain Azure networking, including VNets, DNS, firewalls and private endpoints.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD using Terraform and Azure DevOps.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to engineers and establish platform standards.
• Lead incident resolution and root cause analysis to improve platform health.

Skills

Azure

Kubernetes

DevOps

CI/CD

Security

Monitoring

Networking

Leadership

SQL Server

Tools

Terraform

Azure DevOps

DataDog

App Insights

Palo Alto Firewalls

Checkpoint Firewalls

Job description

Overview:

We operate more car parks in the UK than anyone else for our clients, ensuring they get maximum benefit from the parking space. We’ve been doing this in the UK for over 15 years and with over 300 staff. Now we are on a mission to expand into new markets, opening up operations across Europe including, Germany, Denmark and Austria. We are also innovating with tech such as the use of number plate recognition for efficient click and collect operations, and developing our own electric vehicle charging network, creating a new customer facing brand Evology. It’s a real time of innovation and expansion.

Strong IT is key to delivering on all of our ambitions, we are now investing in the team and updating our systems, technologies and practices to help achieve them.

Reporting to the Head of Delivery this role is a newly created position and is core in helping us to drive forward with our exciting tech journey and significant investment in improving the current stack and processes. This is a great time to join and have real influence on the future of tech with an industry leader.

As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will be engaged in Azure native approaches, aid in establishing Azure best practices across our UK and EU platforms and be involved with maintaining strong KPI’s.

Team leadership experience

• Lead a small team of Platform Engineers
• Mentor and coach engineers across differing skill levels
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, collaboration and accountability
• Act as a technical point of escalation for the team
• Partner closely with IT, Software Engineers, Product Owners, QA’s and BA’s
• Break down complex initiatives into deliverable milestones
• Translate product and business requirements into technical solution

Role Requirements

• Be the SME. Lead the design, operation, and continuous improvement of our Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure and hybrid environments.
• Own and manage AKS/Kubernetes environments, including upgrades, scaling, security, and reliability.
• Design and maintain Azure networking, including VNets, DNS, firewalls, private endpoints, load balancing, and connectivity. Recent experience on configuring Palo Alto & Checkpoint firewalls, Azure Network Security Groups (NSG's) and Application Security Groups (ASG's).
• Hands on experience of security management, architecture, and tooling.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD using tools such as Terraform and Azure DevOps. Strong CI/CD skills, and experience of supporting software engineering teams
• Own the monitoring, logging, observability, and alerting, ensuring platform health and rapid identification of issues (DataDog and AppInsights), working with Development teams to ensure implementation of end to end monitoring.
• Manage and troubleshoot SQL Server/Azure SQL, including connectivity, performance, backups, and availability.
• Ensure strong security, resilience, disaster recovery, continual cost optimisation, and Azure governance across the platform.
• Lead incident resolution, root cause analysis, automation, documentation, and operational improvements.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to engineers while defining platform engineering standards and best practices.
• Strong experience with Azure, Kubernetes, networking, Linux/Windows, scripting, containers, and cloud-native technologies.