Lead Platform Engineer – Cloud-Native Distributed Systems

Sanderson; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanderson in London is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to lead design, deployment, and operation of distributed platforms powering critical services.

This hands-on role focuses on cloud infrastructure, AWS, Terraform, and distributed databases, combining technical leadership with close implementation ownership.

You will mentor engineers, drive IaC adoption, and collaborate with software, SRE and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure cloud-native solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating AWS-based infrastructure platforms.
• Expert-level Terraform experience within enterprise production environments.
• Extensive Linux systems administration and troubleshooting capability.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture.
• Hands-on experience designing, deploying and supporting distributed persistence platforms.
• Strong knowledge of clustering, replication, high availability and disaster recovery architectures.
• Experience operating critical production services at scale.
• Strong automation and Infrastructure-as-Code mindset.
• Excellent problem-solving and stakeholder engagement skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate large-scale distributed infrastructure platforms.
• Develop and maintain highly available cloud-native environments using AWS and Terraform.
• Deploy, manage and support distributed persistence technologies and data platforms.
• Design resilient architectures incorporating clustering, replication, failover and disaster recovery patterns.
• Improve platform reliability, scalability, observability and operational excellence.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure and distributed systems issues across production environments.
• Drive automation and Infrastructure-as-Code adoption across engineering teams.
• Define and implement platform engineering best practices and engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers and act as a subject matter expert for distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to ensure platforms are scalable, secure and fit for purpose.

Skills

AWS

Distributed systems

Linux

Automation

Platform engineering

Tools

Terraform

Kafka

MongoDB

Couchbase

Redis

ClickHouse

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Python

Golang

Docker

Job description

Sanderson in London is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to lead design, deployment, and operation of distributed platforms powering critical services.

This hands-on role focuses on cloud infrastructure, AWS, Terraform, and distributed databases, combining technical leadership with close implementation ownership.

You will mentor engineers, drive IaC adoption, and collaborate with software, SRE and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure cloud-native solutions.