Principal Platform Engineer

watchTowr; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Meaningful role in a fast‑growing business

Access to advanced tools

Job summary

A leading cybersecurity firm in Greater London is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer with expertise in networking and distributed systems. This role involves architecting and scaling scanning infrastructure while collaborating closely with product and engineering teams. Ideal candidates will have over 8 years of experience on large-scale systems and a background in cybersecurity platforms. The firm offers competitive compensation and a chance to work with cutting-edge technology in a high-growth environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems.
• Experience with cybersecurity platforms or security data at scale.
• Direct experience scaling a platform from a single region to a multi-region deployment.
• Hands‑on cloud infrastructure setup, operations, and maintenance.
• Experience with Agile delivery and cross‑functional teamwork.

Responsibilities

• Architect, scale, and optimise distributed scanning infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Security, and Engineering teams.
• Champion engineering best practices, including infrastructure-as-code.
• Move from single-region to multi-region/global architecture; improve throughput and availability.
• Collaborate with Product, Security, and Engineering to meet evolving needs.
• Champion infrastructure‑as‑code, automation, secure‑by‑design principles, and observability.

Skills

Networking

Distributed systems

Large-scale infrastructure design

DevOps performance

Cloud infrastructure

Agile methodologies

Operational documentation

Node.js

Docker

Docker Compose

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

Elasticsearch

Kafka

Prometheus

Jaeger/OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Airflow

GitHub Actions

AWS CodeBuild

EFK stack

Observability

Tools

AWS

Azure

Terraform

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Job description

About WatchTowr

WatchTowr is the Preemptive Exposure Management capability trusted by Fortune 500 companies and critical infrastructure providers. By combining proactive threat intelligence, real attacker telemetry, and automated red teaming, WatchTowr continuously identifies and validates real exposure so security teams can outrun real‑world threats.

We are a global team of operators, researchers, and engineers who have spent years thinking like attackers. We are in a high‑growth phase and want exceptional people to join us.

Principal Platform Engineer

We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer with deep expertise in networking, distributed systems, and large‑scale infrastructure design to help us scale our automated scanning platform to global levels.

Responsibilities

• Architect, scale, and optimise our distributed scanning infrastructure, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and reliable operation at global scale.
• Advance DevOps performance and delivery excellence, continuously improving:
  • Deployment frequency
  • Change lead time
  • Change failure rate
  • Mean time to recovery
• Solve complex scaling challenges across compute, data pipelines, networking, and orchestration, including:
  • Evolving from single‑region to multi‑region/global architecture
  • Increasing data processing throughput across workflow pipelines
  • Improving overall system availability, observability, and fault tolerance
• Collaborate closely with Product, Security, and Engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities meet evolving business and customer needs.
• Champion engineering best practices, including infrastructure‑as‑code, automation‑by‑default, high‑quality operational documentation, and secure‑by‑design principles.
• Drive continuous improvement, helping shape a culture of operational maturity, reliability, and engineering excellence.

Ideal Experience

• 8+ years designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems and high‑throughput networked architectures.
• Experience with cybersecurity platforms or security data at scale (ideally Threat Intelligence and/or Offensive Security‑type solutions).
• Proven experience building engineering organisations in early‑stage, B2B startups serving enterprise clients.
• Demonstrated track record scaling high‑throughput and distributed systems in production.
• Hands‑on experience with cloud infrastructure setup, operations, and maintenance.
• Experience working with cross‑functional teams delivering software using Agile methodologies.
• Strong understanding of OSI Layer 3+ networking concepts and performance optimisation.
• Experience owning, operating, and upgrading systems running in production.
• Direct experience scaling a platform from a single region to a multi‑region or global deployment.
• Exposure to cybersecurity platforms, high‑volume data processing, or other distributed compute environments.
• Technical proficiency across:
  • Cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, GitHub
  • Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC): Terraform
  • Application platform: Kubernetes (AWS EKS), Helm, Docker, Docker Compose
  • Observability: Elastic‑Fluent‑Kibana (EFK) stack, Prometheus, Jaeger/OpenTelemetry, Grafana
  • Persistence: PostgreSQL (RDS), MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka
  • Delivery pipelines: GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild
  • Workflow orchestration: Airflow, Kubernetes
  • Software runtimes: Python, Node.js, Go
• Familiarity with navigating regulatory, privacy, and data sovereignty requirements in the US, UK, and EU.

What’s in it for me?

• Competitive compensation – we believe that hard work, skills and ambition should be fairly compensated.
• Meaningful role in a company – you will be a key and early contributor to a fast‑growing cybersecurity business that helps protect some of the world's largest enterprises.
• The best tools and powerful kit – we enable you with the tools to effectively fulfil your role.
• Endless opportunities – we are in a high‑growth phase of our journey, and plan to promote from within as we scale.
• Work with cyber security experts – we are solving cutting‑edge industry‑wide cyber security challenges with some of the world’s most advanced organisations.

Equal Opportunity Employer

WatchTowr is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. At WatchTowr, we’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and diverse environment where every individual is recognised for their talent and potential. Our hiring decisions are guided by your capabilities, experience, and what you bring to the role – not by unrelated personal attributes.

We have a zero‑tolerance approach to any form of discrimination or harassment. This includes – but isn’t limited to – discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, colour, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, pregnancy or parental status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We actively encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. Even if you don’t tick every box in the job description, we’d still love to hear from you.