Lead Platform Engineer

Travis Perkins; Northampton; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading UK building materials distributor is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer. You'll be responsible for cloud infrastructure design, automation tooling, and ensuring scalable and secure platforms. Proven experience with CI/CD, AWS, and mentorship is essential. This hybrid role involves twice-weekly office visits in Northampton, offering a competitive salary, training, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Benefits

Competitive bonus

Save-as-you-earn scheme

Buy-as-you-earn scheme

Contributory pension scheme

Colleague discount across Group businesses

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in platform engineering with a focus on cloud technologies.
• Knowledge of designing and deploying infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IAC).
• Good knowledge of security practices and networking principles.

Responsibilities

• Design and build automated, scalable cloud platforms.
• Lead support and maintenance of infrastructure to ensure security compliance.
• Mentor and coach team members to build skills and confidence.

Skills

5+ years software development

Experience with CI/CD and GitOps toolsets

Cloud technology awareness (AWS & GCP)

Leadership skills

Education

GCSEs + related A level or BTEC

Industry specific qualifications or certificates

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Gitlab

Job description

Lead Platform Engineer

What will you do?

Travis Perkins are approaching the end of a data centre exit programme which has migrated all of our operational services into AWS as our primary cloud provider. We’re now embarking on an optimisation and modernisation phase which will look to transform these traditional services to take better advantage of cloud opportunities.

An opportunity has arisen for a Lead Platform Engineer, within our Tech & Data function, who will be responsible for designing, building, maintaining and running cloud based infrastructure of both traditional and cloud native platforms. Using cloud technologies and automation tooling you will define, follow and contribute to good design practices, standards, documentation and approaches to create and run scalable, secure & reusable platforms to meet business requirements.

The ideal candidate for this role will have previous experience of the design and transformation of the more traditional enterprise workloads to take advantage of cloud ways of working.

This role is Hybrid working, so travel to our Travis Perkins head office based in Northampton is required twice a week!

Some accountabilities of the role:

• Responsible for the design, development and adoption of automated, scalable and secure cloud platforms and CI / CD pipelines for the strategic delivery of technology solutions. Coauthor proven design patterns for solving common business problems. (Delivery of solutions)
• The engineer will lead the support and maintenance of any infrastructure or platform components to ensure they are operating within supported version and configuration envelopes in order to provide the safest and most secure environment possible. (Patching and security compliance)
• Responsible for co-authoring and maintaining a catalogue of tools, standards, patterns and documents that support our use of our public cloud platforms and overseeing adherence by other platform engineers. Provide architectural assistance to maintain the highest standards of delivery across the team. (Documentation and standards)
• Serve as an escalation point to resolve the more complex technical issues and queries for Cloud platforms and automation tooling, and assist with architectural challenges. (Support and escalation)
• Using the latest tooling design and implementing logging, monitoring, alerting, backup and DR solutions to be used in conjunction with deployed platforms from development all the way through to production to ensure an agreed level of service can be maintained. (Non functional requirements)
• Mentor, coach and lead training for other members of the team such as platform and support engineers to help build their skills and confidence. Provide technical guidance and ensure that quality, standards and best practices are adhered to. (Mentoring and knowledge sharing)
• Continuously assess and optimise the performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of the platform infrastructure. Lead with decommissioning plans where systems / platforms are no longer required. Provision the most cost effective cloud platforms only when required and scaling as appropriate (commercial awareness)
• Proactively develop skills as required to support the fast-changing technology landscape and stay up to date with these technologies to help determine if they may be fit for purpose for consumption within the business (training, development & innovation)

What you’ll need to have / be :

• GCSE’s + related A level or BTEC standard or L3 Apprenticeship
• Any industry specific qualifications or certificates
• 5+ years software development, operations infrastructure support or platform engineering
• Extensive experience with CI / CD and / or GitOps toolsets, building automated pipelines and platforms in cloud as well as infrastructure deploy, build exposure.
• Cloud Technology awareness - ideally AWS & GCP
• Agile, Scrum, iterative software development processes
• Extensive skills using multiple automation tools including Ansible, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Gitlab
• Designing, Deploying and supporting infrastructure using IAC
• Good knowledge of both infrastructure and developer practices.
• A good knowledge of pipelines and Continuous Integration
• Good Knowledge of designing, and deploying platform and infrastructure environments
• Knowledge of containers and serveless and microservices
• Knowledge of networking principles
• Knowledge of security practices
• Good leadership skills

What’s in it for you?

Not Sure you Qualify? We’re driving to become a truly inclusive employer, where everyone in our Group feels safe, welcome and confident to be their authentic selves - you be you, it makes us, us, as we say. If you’re interested in this opportunity but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might be just the right candidate for this or other roles with us.

You’ll be supported by some fantastic training and development and have the opportunity to learn, grow and develop across the Travis Perkins Group.

We’ll also equip you with a benefits package that grows as you grow with the company :

• Competitive bonus
• Save-as-you-earn scheme
• Buy-as-you-earn scheme
• Contributory pension scheme
• Colleague discount across a variety of Group businesses

A bit about us

As the largest distributor of building materials in the UK, Travis Perkins has been helping to build Britain for over 200 years.

With over 5 businesses, 16,000 colleagues and more than 1,200 branches, stores and sites around the UK we believe we have the best people and the best place to work. Everyone works hard together to deliver results, but most importantly, have some fun along the way!