Principal Platform Engineer - Internal Developer Platform Lead

Rowden; Filton; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work

Hybrid work model

Disability Confident Committed

Job summary

Rowden, a Bristol-based engineering powerhouse, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to build and own the Internal Developer Platform used by its engineering teams. You will lead end-to-end platform infrastructure, tooling, and agentic AI integration, enabling faster development and secure, transparent use of autonomous assistants.

You will drive adoption, define standards, and ensure the platform serves as a product for Rowden engineers, with a focus on scalable, trustworthy tooling and

Qualifications

• Substantial experience as a principal or staff software engineer.
• Experience building developer platforms and internal tooling used by engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience implementing agentic AI in real workflows.
• Experience designing guardrails for agentic AI: sandboxing, permissioning, audit logging, observability.
• Deep experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, and Kubernetes.
• Experience building and deploying reproducible development environments.
• Track record of driving adoption through persuasion and good product decisions.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the internal developer platform used by Rowden’s software teams.
• Own engineering infrastructure and end-to-end workflows: source control, CI/CD, artefact management, secrets, environments.
• Champion new tooling and best practices across teams.
• Set technical direction and standards through influence, not mandates.
• Lead the implementation of agentic AI across engineering workflows.
• Evaluate and train teams on effective use of agentic engineering.
• Build infrastructure to ensure agents are trustworthy: sandboxing, permissions, audit logs, observability.
• Create repeatable development environments for local, cloud, and target representations.

Skills

Principal engineer

Developer platform

Agentic AI

CI/CD

Kubernetes

IaC

Reproducible envs

Communication

Tools

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Rowden, a Bristol-based engineering powerhouse, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to build and own the Internal Developer Platform used by its engineering teams. You will lead end-to-end platform infrastructure, tooling, and agentic AI integration, enabling faster development and secure, transparent use of autonomous assistants.

You will drive adoption, define standards, and ensure the platform serves as a product for Rowden engineers, with a focus on scalable, trustworthy tooling and