Platform Engineering Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangements

Pension 5% matched

Health plan & wellbeing

Onsite parking

Job summary

Cintra invites an experienced Platform Engineering Lead to join our Development team in Newcastle upon Tyne. You will own production infrastructure for our SaaS products, balancing hands-on engineering with strategic standards for deployment, security, monitoring and recovery.

This senior role emphasizes technical ownership over people management and requires deep cloud, IaC and DevOps expertise. We offer hybrid working arrangements, competitive salary (£75,000–£80,000/year), and a supportive

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on AWS experience; multi-cloud (Azure/GCP) preferred.
• Terraform IaC with modules and state management.
• CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI or Azure Pipelines.
• Network: VPC/VNET, DNS, load balancers, firewalls.
• DB experience: SQL Server/Azure SQL, PostgreSQL/Aurora, MySQL.
• Monitoring: Datadog, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or GCP Monitoring.
• Identity & access: SSO, IAM, secrets management.
• Security: cloud hardening, least privilege, certs.
• Backup/DR: restore testing, RTO/RPO.
• Incident management and production support.

Responsibilities

• Take technical ownership of production infrastructure.
• Consolidate responsibilities across teams.
• Establish standards for deployment, monitoring, security.
• Ensure production readiness and incident response.

Skills

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD

Networking

Databases

Monitoring

Security

Backup/DR

Production ops

Identity & access

Tools

CircleCI

Azure Pipelines

Datadog

CloudWatch

Azure Monitor

GCP Monitoring

Ansible

Rollbar

Job description

Description

Join our Development Team as a Platform Engineering Lead!

Job Details

Application Deadline: 11 September 2026

Department: Development

Location: Newcastle upon Tyne

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

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.

Further details of the role can be found linked in the Job Description. Please note that we do not accept unsolicited CVs from agencies for this position, we thank you for your cooperation. We reserve the right to close this job advert at anytime should there be a high volume of applications.