Principal Platform Engineer: AI-Driven Platform Leader

Rowden; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Rowden in Bristol is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to define and lead the internal developer platform that underpins how Rowden develops, deploys, and operates technology. The platform will improve developer experience and make Rowden's engineering faster, more consistent, more scalable, and more secure.

Collaborating with Software, Infrastructure, ML, IT, Product, QA and Security teams, you will shape architecture, set standards, and raise engineering practice across the organisation.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating engineering platforms at scale.
• Deep understanding of platform engineering principles, including infrastructure‑as‑code, CI/CD, system design, service integration, and platform product thinking.
• Experience designing platforms that support agentic AI workloads and model orchestration at scale.
• Proven experience defining API strategies and building integration layers between complex systems.
• Extensive experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and FluxCD in production.
• Strong understanding of modular platform design and long‑term scale.
• Expertise in observability tooling (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Secure‑by‑design and zero‑trust principles at architectural level.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python, Go, or similar).
• Experience providing technical leadership across cross‑functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and long‑term direction of Rowden’s internal developer platform (IDP).
• Lead the design and evolution of IDP capabilities, including self‑service provisioning and deployment workflows.
• Define the platform’s approach to agentic AI and runtime infrastructure for autonomous task execution.
• Set API strategies and build integration layers between complex systems.
• Own CI/CD pipelines to support secure, efficient software delivery.
• Drive modular platform capabilities for scalable feature composition.
• Own infrastructure‑as‑code standards and automation practices.
• Incorporate security and compliance into the platform by design.
• Maintain platform standards and reusable components across teams.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and alerting across systems.
• Mentor engineers and raise the organisation's platform engineering standards.
• Identify opportunities to improve developer experience and reduce cognitive load.

Skills

Platform design

IaC & CI/CD

Agentic AI platforms

API strategy

Kubernetes

Terraform

FluxCD

Modular design

Observability

Zero-trust security

Go/Python

Technical leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

FluxCD

Job description

Rowden in Bristol is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to define and lead the internal developer platform that underpins how Rowden develops, deploys, and operates technology. The platform will improve developer experience and make Rowden's engineering faster, more consistent, more scalable, and more secure.

Collaborating with Software, Infrastructure, ML, IT, Product, QA and Security teams, you will shape architecture, set standards, and raise engineering practice across the organisation.