Principal Platform Engineer - 12-Month Fixed-Term Contract

Medtronic plc; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 143,000; Full time

Job summary

Medtronic plc is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to develop and maintain critical software tooling and infrastructure. You will work on cloud resource support, automation, and observability while collaborating with multiple software teams to deliver pragmatic, scalable solutions.

You will design, build, and operate distributed systems in production, leveraging OpenTofu, EKS, Helm, and Python where needed.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of platform engineering, DevOps, or site reliability engineering experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as OpenTofu, EKS and Helm.
• Track record of navigating ambiguity and breaking down complex problems as requirements evolve.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production with attention to performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), databases, APIs, and modern DevOps practices.
• Willingness to commute to London 2–3 days per week, with flexible arrangements.

Responsibilities

• Enhance and maintain Infrastructure as Code repository to support engineers with cloud resources.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines to improve efficiency and automate processes.
• Provide observability tools to enable self-discovery of issues by engineers.
• Identify gaps in developer productivity and design targeted solutions.
• Provide technical mentorship inside and outside the team.

Skills

Ambiguity navigation

Distributed systems design

Cloud fundamentals

DevOps practices

Mentorship

Problem solving

Python programming

Tools

OpenTofu

AWS

EKS

Helm

CI/CD pipelines

Observability tools

GitOps

Job description

Careers that change lives start here. Medtronic is a global leader in healthcare technology with a Mission to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. Our 95,000 employees work across more than 150 countries to put patients first — developing innovative medical technologies that improve the lives of 72+ million patients each year. Your unique talents will help shape the future of healthcare while building a career grounded in purpose, growth, and impact.

A Day in the Life

Medtronic Digital Technologies is creating ambitious new products that bring connectivity, real-time guidance, and decision support to the operating room. To support this mission, we are developing compact, high-performance, embedded systems that enable edge computing and connectivity. Working closely with other teams across Medtronic, we are creating a connected ecosystem and leveraging the state of the art in computer vision to provide the most comprehensive view of surgery. If you’re interested in using cutting-edge technology to improve the standard of care in surgery on a global scale, this could be the place for you.

This role is focused on developing and maintaining critical software engineering tools and architecture to drive engineering efficiency, reliability, and continuous improvement. The responsibilities will be diverse, ranging from maintaining AWS resources through Infrastructure as Code (we use OpenTofu) through to enhancing observability tools (we embrace OpenTelemetry) and supporting AI agentic workflows. You will be working with different software engineering groups to understand their problems and coming up with a pragmatic, maintainable solution to solve their problems.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Enhance and maintain our Infrastructure as Code repository to give all our engineers the best cloud resource support.
• Contribute to our CI/CD pipelines to driver further efficiency of our engineers – automate everything where possible.
• Provide observability tools to engineers so they can self-discover issues.
• Find gaps in developer productivity and design, implement solutions to solve them.
• Provide technical mentorship to others, inside and outside of the team.

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years of platform engineering, DevOps, or site reliability engineering experience, working with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools – we use OpenTofu, EKS and Helm.
• Track record of successfully navigating ambiguity, including making progress with incomplete information, breaking down complex problems, and adapting approach as requirements evolve.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production, with solid understanding of architectural trade-offs involving performance, scalability, and reliability
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), databases, APIs, and modern DevOps practice.
• Must be willing to commute to London 2–3 days per week, with flexibility around the exact arrangement.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with designing golden paths for internal software engineers - internal developer platforms, developer experience products.
• Experience with Python - when we cannot leverage IaC our code is Python based.
• Experience with deploying production GitOps platforms that manage deployments of multiple applications effectively.
• Familiarity with Governance, Risk , and Compliance (GRC) engineering – platform engineering means we have a duty to address our security and compliance issues through automated means.
• Experience with Agentic AI infrastructure – you have built an AI coding agent that goes beyond markdown files on an IDE.

Physical Job Requirements

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by employees assigned to this position, but they are not an exhaustive list of all the required responsibilities and skills of this position.

Benefits & Compensation

Medtronic offers a competitive Salary and flexible Benefits Package
A commitment to our employees lives at the core of our values. We recognize their contributions. They share in the success they help to create. We offer a wide range of benefits, resources, and competitive compensation plans designed to support you at every career and life stage.

Pay range / Rango salarial / Intervalo salarial /Fascia retributiva / Tranche de salaire / Gehaltsband / Salaribereik: United Kingdom: 95,200.00 GBP- 142,800.00 GBP|

This position is eligible for a short-term incentive called the Medtronic Incentive Plan (MIP).