Principal Engineer

Beamery; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Beamery is seeking a hands-on Principal Platform Engineer to lead reliability and scale across the engineering org. You will design architectures, guide platform initiatives, and mentor engineers while ensuring services are scalable, observable, and cost-efficient.

Experience with Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), GitOps, and production-grade tooling is essential; Go development is a plus. You will influence incident response and architectural standards across teams.

Qualifications

• Strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and cloud infrastructure experience.
• Proven track record delivering scalable, reliable cloud-based platforms.
• Deep Kubernetes production cluster management including upgrades, autoscaling, quotas, RBAC and networking.
• IaC with Terraform and modern GitOps practices.
• Solid software engineering foundations with production tooling.
• Go experience is preferable; NodeJS is a plus.
• Strong observability, SLOs, alerting and cost management for large-scale systems.

Responsibilities

• Design solutions and architectures for platform and infrastructure initiatives with cross-team impact.
• Help teams ship scalable, reliable, and cost-effective services while maintaining hands-on credibility.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering Directors on planning large platform initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Define and update architectural vision to support Beamery's strategy.
• Guide on-call practices and incident response, improving observability and reliability.

Skills

SRE

Cloud engineering

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

Observability

Incident response

Go programming

Cost management

Tools

Kafka

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Elasticsearch

Istio

Job description

ABOUT BEAMERY

With the rapid expansion of AI and automation, the future of work has never been more challenging for organizations. Beamery's unique jobs, skills and tasks data platform helps organizations navigate these challenges and make more informed decisions across Talent Lifecycle Management. Our solutions power recruitment, mobility, upskilling, diversity, work architecture and workforce planning for some of the world's most forward-thinking companies. We believe that where you work is much more than just a job. Millions of people are being left behind every day in their careers, and we're on a mission to fix this by creating equal access to meaningful work, skills and careers for all. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to building a representative Beamery, creating an equitable, inclusive and engaging environment for our people. So, what are you waiting for? Join us and help us transform the future of work once and for all.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Principal Platform Engineers at Beamery solve the toughest reliability, scalability and infrastructure problems with the highest impact. Together they collaborate to set the standards for how Engineering will build, run and operate services in support of Beamery's strategic vision. The Platform team enables engineering teams to build scalable and reliable services by supporting a foundation of tools and common services - including our managed Kubernetes clusters, observability tooling, and much more - while setting best practices around incident management and cost controls and empowering teams to build it, run it. The Principal Engineers work together as a unified team with a common goal, ensuring our platform and architecture are as best as they can be to enable Product teams to deliver with ease and at scale. They provide technical guidance and mentorship to Engineers across all teams, playing a key role in raising the bar for Engineering performance.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING AT BEAMERY

Design solutions, produce architectures and write RFCs for platform, reliability and infrastructure initiatives which have impact across Engineering and beyond. Maintain your hands-on credibility by helping teams ship scalable, reliable and cost-effective services. Partner with Product and Engineering Directors on planning by scoping and sizing large new platform initiatives that span multiple teams. Work with other Principal Engineers to create and update the architectural vision that will deliver on Beamery's strategy. Engage with other Principal Engineers in setting and advocating company-wide standards for operational excellence, observability, reliability and incident response. Take a whole-company view of major incidents, identifying recurring themes and turning them into company-level investments. Own and evolve the platform and infrastructure tech radar, making data-backed cases for the adoption and deprecation of technologies and services. Set the standard for operational ownership, supporting teams to own their services end-to-end. Coaching and mentoring Engineers all the way up to Staff level from teams across the organisation. Collaborate on customer solutions with non-technical stakeholders including Sales, Customer Success and our high profile, Fortune 500 customers. Stay connected to production through on-call, and use that vantage point to raise the bar for incident response, observability and reliability across the whole engineering organisation.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We are seeking a hands-on technical leader with deep Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Cloud expertise who can set direction across the engineering organisation. Key skills/experience: A proven track record of designing and delivering scalable, reliable cloud-based infrastructure and platform services. Extensive experience running and supporting services in production environments, including on-call leadership and incident command at scale. Previous experience as an individual contributor in an Engineering leadership position (Staff+, Principal, Architect, etc.). Deep expertise managing Kubernetes production clusters at scale - cluster lifecycle and upgrades, resource optimization (autoscaling, quotas), security (RBAC, Network Policies), high availability and troubleshooting complex networking or scheduling issues. Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), particularly Terraform, and modern GitOps practices. Strong software engineering foundations with the ability to build and maintain production-grade tooling. Experience with Go would be preferable. NodeJS is a plus. A strong understanding of observability, SLOs, alerting and cost management for large-scale systems. Operational experience with our key infrastructure components: Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Istio. Familiarity with LLMOps is a plus; helping shape how we operate LLM-powered systems at scale (model gateways and routing with LiteLLM, experiment and model tracking with MLflow) would be a welcome bonus. A FinOps mindset; you drive cost-awareness as an engineering discipline across teams, balancing spend against reliability and performance, and turn infrastructure cost into a metric teams own rather than a surprise on the bill. People leadership in the form of mentorship and coaching. Ability to collaborate with non-technical colleagues to convert ambiguously defined problems into well-understood requirements and pragmatic solutions. Beamery is for Everybody. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to us. We acknowledge the challenges in our industry and strive to develop an inclusive culture where everybody can contribute. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, national origin, age, disability status, or caregiver status. If, for whatever reason, you need us to make reasonable adjustments and adaptations to our recruitment process, please email [e-mail]. Visit our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion page to learn more about progress and commitments.