Platform Engineering Lead

Cintra HR & Payroll Services Ltd; Newcastle upon Tyne; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Pension 5%

Health plan

Onsite parking

Job summary

Cintra HR & Payroll Services Ltd is hiring a Platform Engineering Lead to own production infrastructure for our SaaS payroll solutions. You will consolidate responsibilities across teams, establish standards for deployment, monitoring, security, and recovery, and drive reliability across platforms.

The role focuses on hands-on technical ownership rather than people management, with opportunities for professional development and a collaborative work environment.

Qualifications

• Essential cloud and infrastructure expertise for production SaaS platforms.
• Experience designing and maintaining multi-cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform and IaC workflows.
• Strong CI/CD implementation and maintenance capabilities.
• Solid cloud networking, security, and IAM practices.

Responsibilities

• Own production infrastructure and platform reliability.
• Define and enforce infrastructure standards and deployment processes.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for P1 issues.
• Collaborate with DevOps and development teams to improve observability and recovery.

Skills

AWS

Azure

GCP

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Networking

SQL/Azure SQL

Datadog/CloudWatch

IAM/SSO

Security

Backup/DR

Incident management

Tools

Circl eCI

Job description

Platform Engineering Lead

Application Deadline: 11 September 2026

Department: Development

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Newcastle upon Tyne

Compensation: £75,000 - £80,000 / year

Description

Join our Development Team as a Platform Engineering Lead! We are Cintra. Known for our award-winning software that delivers payroll solutions to over 1000 clients. If you're passionate about payroll and are eager to join a dynamic team of seasoned professionals, this is the opportunity for you. As the proud recipient of the Payroll Service Provider of the Year 2025 award at the CIPP Annual Excellence Awards, we offer exciting opportunities for professional development, competitive bonus structures, and a collaborative work environment. Our modern offices are located in Hoults Yard, nestled on the outskirts of the vibrant Ouseburn Valley. This area boasts a thriving creative community, rich local heritage, and a lively social scene.

Why This Role Is Different

We are looking for a senior, hands‑on Platform / DevOps engineer to take technical ownership of the production infrastructure supporting our SaaS products. This is primarily a technical ownership role rather than a people‑management role. The successful candidate will consolidate responsibilities currently distributed across several development teams and establish consistent standards for infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, security, recovery and production support.

What We’re Looking For

Core Technical Skills

Essential / strong experience:

• Cloud: Strong hands‑on AWS experience. Ideally also Azure and/or GCP with the ability to own a multi‑cloud estate.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform essential, including modules, state management, standards and controlled infrastructure changes.
• CI/CD: Building and maintaining automated deployment pipelines; experience with tools such as CircleCI, Azure Pipelines or equivalent.
• Cloud networking: VPC/VNET, routing, DNS, load balancers, firewalls, security groups and connectivity.
• Databases: Operational experience with SQL Server/Azure SQL, PostgreSQL/Aurora and/or MySQL availability, security, backup and recovery rather than application query development.
• Monitoring & observability: Datadog, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring or equivalent; proactive alerting and production health monitoring.
• Identity & access: SSO, cloud IAM, privileged/JIT access, service accounts and secrets management.
• Security: Cloud hardening, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, certificates and secure production access.
• Backup & DR: Backup strategy, restore testing, failover, RTO/RPO and disaster‑recovery planning.
• Production operations: Strong incident‑management skills, root‑cause analysis, runbooks and P1 production support.

Useful Experience

• AWS ECS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Aurora, DynamoDB and Cognito.
• Azure App Services, Azure SQL and Azure Storage.
• GCP App Engine, Cloud SQL, Datastore and Cloud Storage.
• Windows Server, RDP/RDWeb and mixed Windows/Linux estates.
• Ansible or other configuration‑management tooling.
• Rollbar and application/infrastructure logging.
• Cloud cost optimisation and capacity management.

Why Join Cintra?

At Cintra we know our colleagues are our biggest asset and an investment in them is an investment into the company. We offer:

• Hybrid and flexible working arrangements supporting your work‑life balance
• Employer matched pension contribution to 5%
• Wellbeing support through our company‑funded health plan, health checks and employee assistance program
• Onsite parking
• And more!

We go the extra mile to strategically invest in our employees by providing them with invaluable learning opportunities to propel their careers forward. Our commitment to continuous employee training ensures that knowledge remains up-to-date, skills stay sharp, and confidence continues to grow. We firmly believe in empowering our workforce with the tools they need to thrive and succeed.