Principal Platform Engineer

Halfords; Portsmouth; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading retailer is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to design scalable cloud infrastructure and drive DevOps best practices. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in AWS, Azure, and CI/CD processes, while mentoring teams and leading platform changes. Join to shape the future of a global platform in an exciting growth phase.

Benefits

Annual discretionary bonus scheme

Pension and life assurance

25 days annual leave plus bank holidays

Enhanced family leave

Employee discounts

Wellbeing support

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience leading platform changes.
• Experience with Cloud Providers like AWS and Azure.
• Proven experience writing Infrastructure as Code.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building scalable infrastructure.
• Promoting writing of IaC modules for repeatability.
• Supporting client operations with deployments.

Skills

Cloud Computing

AWS

Azure

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD

.NET/C#

APM Tools

Microservices

APIs

Agile Development

Job description

Join to apply for the Principal Platform Engineer role at Halfords

Join to apply for the Principal Platform Engineer role at Halfords

This range is provided by Halfords. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

Please note: While this is a Remote position, you must be based and eligible to work in the UK.

About Us

At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer-driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience—from e-bike and electric vehicle servicing to on-demand solutions. Our commitment is to foster customer loyalty by offering compelling reasons to keep coming back to our stores, ensuring a lifetime of motoring and cycling enjoyment.

Halfords is quickly becoming a digital services business. In addition to being a leading UK retailer, Halfords has now developed a market leading field service management platform that enables businesses to deliver their complex services to customers through an end-to-end digital solution. The platform is deployed throughout Halfords stores, garages and their mobile business. The platform has now been taken to market to enable other businesses in our sector and other industries globally to deliver market leading service delivery and an unrivalled customer experience. This SaaS division is called Avayler (Avayler.com).

Avayler is marketed in the UK, Europe and the US. We have a highly experienced technology team that have developed our platform, and have sales, product, and marketing functions already in place, led by seasoned industry veterans. Now with the launch of the platform and the launch of our clients, ATD (American Tires Distributors) in North America and ATU in EMEA, we are looking for an experienced Principal Platform Engineer in our business.

If you’re willing to get stuck in, you’ll love it here too. So put yourself at the heart of a dynamic, fast-paced working environment where expertise and focus take people far.

The role

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you take pride in designing and running scalable, secure, and efficient cloud-based infrastructure that supports high-quality software delivery. From embedding deployment pipelines to standardising tooling and components, you play a critical role in ensuring the platform runs smoothly across global teams.

You are collaborative, communicative, and confident in mentoring teammates and working closely with developers to drive DevOps best practices. With strong experience in AWS, Azure, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and C# development, you know how to balance operational excellence with innovation.

To you, it’s the opportunity to join a fast-moving scale-up in an exciting growth phase, where you'll shape the future of a global platform used by major enterprise clients. It’s not just about keeping things ticking over. It’s about solving problems, implementing improvements, and helping deliver cutting-edge garage management solutions to customers worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Working closely with Head of Engineering to co-ordinate and lead platform changes that affect the entire organisation
• Leading a close-knit squad to design and build high availability & scalable infrastructure
• Promote and be involved in the writing of IaC modules which promote repeatability and developer ease
• Constantly strive to design and engineer with the future in mind, weighing up the gain from re-usable components that can speed up future development vs the benefit to customers and consumers
• Be involved in all aspects of the iterative software delivery lifecycle, contributing to strategies and tactics to increase quality and efficiency
• Lead communities of like-minded people to grow their skill set and improve our use of technology
• Support our client operations team with their production deployments and production support

About You

• Demonstrable experience leading end-to-end platform level changes
• A strong level of experience of working with modern Cloud Providers – We use AWS and Azure.
• Proven commercial experience writing Infrastructure as Code
• A solid understanding of working with CI/CD pipelines
• Experience working with APM tools, e.g. Datadog
• A good level of experience using .NET/C# and/or TypeScript
• Commercial experience with PowerShell, Bash or similar
• Knowledge of microservices and developing APIs, specifically RESTful APIs
• An understanding of the ways of agile software development
• A focus on improving developer experience & agility.
• A fair and competitive salary evaluated against market data, annual discretionary bonus scheme, pension, life assurance, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays and enhanced family leave.
• Commitment and dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We help you to own and grow your potential so you can be at your best in your current role and to support your future career aspirations.
• You will have access to a wealth of employee discounts across the Halfords suite of products and services.
• Wellbeing and inclusion are at the heart of our colleague experience. We offer resources and ongoing support to enhance your wellbeing at work and active Colleague Networks supporting inclusion initiatives across Halfords.

Not sure you meet all the criteria? We'd encourage you to take the wheel and apply anyway! At Halfords we are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for our colleagues. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud to welcome applications from all backgrounds and embrace diversity within our one Halfords Family.

This position is mostly remote, but will require occasional travel when necessary.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Engineering and Information Technology

• Industries

  Retail

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