Lead Software Engineer - Cloud Platform

shuttle; England; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading cloud technology company in the United Kingdom is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to shape the future of their cloud platform. This role combines technical contributions with leadership responsibilities, requiring expertise in cloud infrastructure and a background in DevOps. Ideal candidates will have over 5 years of relevant experience and possess solid programming skills in Python, Go, or Rust. The position emphasizes scaling the platform while maintaining operational excellence.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with major cloud providers.
• Experience designing, building and operating production systems.
• Ability to read Rust code and review PRs.

Responsibilities

• Contribute directly to the codebase and oversee best practices.
• Design and operate reliable services in production.
• Own planning, resourcing, and execution in an agile environment.

Skills

Expertise with AWS or GCP

Scalable and secure production systems design

Practical Kubernetes experience

Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi, Terraform)

CI/CD best practices

Expertise in Python, Go, or Rust

DevOps and software engineering background

Leadership experience

Job description

The Role

This role offers the opportunity to both shape the future of Shuttle’s cloud platform and backend components and take on a leadership position within the Platform team. You will be responsible for guiding technical direction, managing stakeholder expectations, and driving the development of platform features and operability at scale.

The Shuttle Platform is the foundation that powers how developers build, deploy, and scale applications with Shuttle. It brings together the underlying cloud infrastructure, backend services, and developer experience tooling into a unified system.

Job Description

70% IC / 30% leadership

1. Technical Contribution:
   • Contribute directly to the codebase, setting standards for testing, frameworks, and automation.
   • Ship features, promote best practices, and drive workflow improvements across the org.
   • Oversee adoption of best technologies (e.g. Kubernetes) and promote best practices across teams.
   • Apply deep expertise in observability and orchestration to deliver cloud deployment software at scale.
2. Scaling the Platform:
   • Design, deploy, and operate highly reliable and observable services in production.
   • Apply cloud architecture patterns such as backpressure queues, multi-layer caching, and event-driven streaming to handle load at scale.
   • Build and maintain high-throughput data pipelines that power accurate, real-time analytics.
3. Team Leadership:
   • Own planning, resourcing, execution, and future hiring in an agile environment.
   • Build strong stakeholder relationships, guiding decisions and managing cross-team communication and expectations.
   • Champion the use of AI within the team and promote continuous improvement in architecture, design, and workflows.

Must Haves

• Expertise with at least one major cloud infrastructure provider (AWS or GCP), with 5+ years of hands‑on experience.
• Proven ability to design, build, and operate scalable and secure production systems (5+ years).
• Practical experience using Kubernetes in at least one production system at scale.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Pulumi, Terraform), with a clear preference and opinions on effective use.
• Knowledge of CI/CD best practices, with the ability to identify and implement improvements to team efficiency.
• Strong expertise in one of Python, Go, or Rust.
• Able to (at least) read Rust code and review PRs.
• Combined background in DevOps and software engineering.
• Demonstrated leadership experience, having managed small teams of at least 2–3 engineers.

Bonus points

• Hands‑on Rust development, either in open‑source projects or commercial environments.
• A polyglot engineer.
• Experience as a senior engineer within a startup or scale‑up team.
• Direct experience building or operating a Platform as a Service (PaaS).
• Contributions to widely recognised open‑source projects.