Platform Engineer

FairPlay Sports Media Ltd.; Greater London; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

FairPlay Sports Media Ltd. is building a tech-led platform to support real-time sports data and media delivery. We seek a Platform Engineer to design and run scalable cloud infrastructure, champion security by design, and empower product squads with robust environments and tooling.

You will own incident response, automations, and production-readiness for high-availability systems, collaborating with Senior engineers to deliver reliable, compliant platforms for peak sporting events.

Qualifications

• 3-5 years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Engineering.
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes.
• Proficient with GitOps pipelines (Argo CD/Flux) and CI/CD (GitLab CI).
• Scripting in Python, Go, or Bash; ability to build reusable tooling.
• On-call experience and incident response discipline.
• Security-minded with cloud-native best practices and cost optimization.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate GCP infrastructure (Compute, GKE, Cloud SQL, etc.).
• Deploy and run services on GKE, including autoscaling and Helm configuration.
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines and environment promotion with security checks.
• Improve developer experience with self-service tooling and runbooks.
• Participate in on-call rotation and manage incidents per incident process.
• Support production readiness for peak events and high-traffic workloads.
• Contribute to security reviews and policy-as-code in pipelines.

Skills

Cloud engineering

On-call

Security

Cost awareness

Leadership

Education

CKA

GCP DevOps Cert

GCP Architect Cert

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

GitLab CI

Argo CD/Flux

Google Cloud Platform

Job description

FairPlay Sports Media is building a tech-led, AI and data-powered sports media network that serves both owned brands (e.g., oddschecker, WhoScored.com, SuperScommesse, and others) and partners with BetTech products spanning data, display, and predictive capabilities. At FairPlay scale - real-time data, high-frequency updates, and partner integrations - the Platform team provides the infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and observability that let multiple engineering teams ship and operate reliable, compliant, high-throughput products. Our busiest moments - major sporting events, new market launches, and B2B partner go-lives - are when the platform matters most, and the Platform team makes sure the foundations hold., You'll take part in the on-call rotation, automate away operational toil, apply secure-by-default practices to everything you build, and support product development squads with the environments, pipelines, and tooling they need to move quickly and safely. You'll work with limited oversight on 2-3 month pieces of work and contribute to larger initiatives led by Senior engineers.,

• Cloud Infrastructure: Design, build, and operate GCP infrastructure (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, VPC networking) as Terraform, following and contributing to the team's shared modules and standards.
• Kubernetes Workloads: Deploy and run services on GKE - workloads, networking, storage, autoscaling, and Helm-based configuration - and help product development squads containerise and operate their applications well.
• CI/CD: Build and maintain GitLab CI pipelines: artifact management, environment promotion, and safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rollback), with policy and security checks baked in.
• Developer Experience & Automation: Identify toil and remove it with Python, Go, or Bash tooling; improve self-service for product development squads (environments, access, deployments).
• AI-assisted Engineering: Use Claude Code and adjacent tooling deliberately as part of day-to-day work - managing context, using sub-agents for investigation and adversarial review, and writing reusable skills (prompt-driven automations) for repeat tasks., Keeping the platform healthy and the team ready for peak events:
• Observability: Build and maintain metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (Google Cloud Operations Suite, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry or equivalents) for the components you own; define and track SLIs/SLOs.
• On-Call & Incident Response: Take part in a week-long 24hr on-call rotation: respond to escalations from product teams and to platform-owned alerts; triage, mitigate, and elevate following our incident process. On-call duties and escalations are additionally compensated via callout pay.
• Runbooks & Post-Incident Reviews: Write and maintain accurate runbooks; contribute to blameless post-incident reviews and see durable follow-up actions through to completion.
• Production Readiness: Factor upcoming critical business events - peak sporting fixtures, market launches, B2B go-lives - into your work, and support load testing, capacity, and failover checks led by Senior engineers.

Pillar 3: Security & Compliance Building security in from the start:

• Identity & Access: Implement least-privilege IAM, Workload Identity, and service account hygiene in the components you build; elevate design decisions with wider security or compliance implications.
• Secrets & Configuration: Use Google Secret Manager and Cloud KMS for secrets and encryption; keep configuration safe and auditable; ensure credentials never end up in code or pipelines.
• Guardrails in Delivery: Contribute to policy-as-code across Terraform and security scanning (SCA/SAST, container image scanning) in GitLab pipelines, working alongside our Security function.
• Security Reviews: Consider security during design, raise implications explicitly, and contribute to security reviews of your own and others' components., Product Development Squads: Understand their needs, unblock delivery, and communicate progress, risks, and operational status clearly.
• Platform Team: Deliver alongside Senior engineers; contribute to shared modules, patterns, and standards; write clear documentation for what you own.
• Coaching: Pair with and review the work of Junior engineers, explaining your decisions so they can learn from them.
• Experience: 3-5 years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Engineering within a modern cloud environment, delivering production infrastructure with limited oversight.
• GCP & Containers: Solid hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (Compute, IAM, VPC, GKE, Cloud Storage, managed data services) and containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Proficient with Terraform - modules, state management, and reviewing changes safely.
• CI/CD: Proficient at building and debugging pipelines (GitLab CI or similar), including artifact handling and deployment strategies.
• Observability: Proficient with metrics, logs, and traces; has built dashboards and actionable alerting and understands SLIs/SLOs.
• Linux & Networking: Proficient with Linux systems (processes, filesystems, systemd, shell) and a working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and VPC networking.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficient in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash, and able to read the others.
• Operations: Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation and handling common incidents calmly and methodically.
• Security Fundamentals: Working knowledge of secure-by-default practices in cloud infrastructure: least privilege, secrets management, safe configuration., Experience with high-traffic or real-time systems (sports, betting, finance, media streaming).
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) with an understanding of context management, sub-agents, MCP, and hooks.
• Experience with GitOps-style workflows (e.g. Argo CD or Flux) for managing Kubernetes and infrastructure changes.
• Exposure to policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest, Sentinel, or similar) and security scanning in pipelines.
• Exposure to security or compliance practices in regulated environments (e.g. gambling regulation, SOC 2, ISO 27001).
• Cost and efficiency awareness in cloud environments (rightsizing, committed use, FinOps practices).
• Relevant certifications (GCP Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect, CKA).

Soft Skills

• Ownership & Pragmatism: You take initiative, pursue problems to resolution, and balance speed with care - and know when to raise a trade-off rather than decide alone.
• Calm under Pressure: You stay methodical during incidents, ask for help early, and follow through on the actions that stop it happening again.
• Communication & Collaboration: You explain technical decisions clearly to developers and teammates, write documentation people actually use, and give and receive constructive review feedback.
• Curiosity & Growth: You're keen to learn across the full breadth of the platform and to help those around you learn too.