Senior Platform Engineer: Kubernetes & CI/CD Lead

United States Digital Space LLC; Manchester; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

The Senior Platform Engineer role at the company focuses on championing the deployment architecture for our Kubernetes platform, with hands-on responsibility for CI/CD pipelines, guardrails, and migration strategies in an on-premise estate. You will collaborate with TechOps and engineering teams to modernise deployment and scale workloads.

You will drive Kubernetes standardisation, containerisation of existing workloads, and the development of self-service runbooks, while owning observability

Qualifications

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills: we're a people-first culture where teamwork is paramount.
• Strong, demonstrable experience with Ansible: roles, inventories, vault, idempotency.
• Comfortable with Docker and Docker Compose in production environments.
• Understanding of networking fundamentals.
• Strong scripting ability: Bash and Python.
• Experience with GitOps tooling: ArgoCD or Flux.
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager or equivalent).
• Ability to think creatively within constraints and plan pragmatically around them: our stack is real-world, not greenfield-perfect.
• A methodical, security-conscious approach.

Responsibilities

• Utilise and contribute to Ansible-based deployment automation to facilitate seamless product feature releases.
• Monitor application-level health within the cluster, collaborating with TechOps on incident response and driving post-mortems for engineering-led deployments.
• Maintain clear documentation, deployment runbooks, and developer self-service guides to streamline the engineering onboarding and release processes.
• Represent Engineering as a key stakeholder in platform design: shape engineering self-service workflows, guardrails, and standards for Kubernetes primitives.
• Standardise application-level configurations: establish clear engineering standards within namespaces for ingress, RBAC, and secrets management.
• Drive phased application migrations: containerise and migrate workloads to Kubernetes, starting with non-critical environments.
• Build robust deployment pipelines: establish CI/CD workflows for Kubernetes-based deployments with automated guardrails.
• Implement application observability: set up metrics, logging, and alerting within namespaces.
• Create developer self-service documentation: document deployment runbooks and templates for onboarding.

Skills

Ansible

Docker

Networking basics

Bash scripting

Python scripting

GitOps

ArgoCD

Flux

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

Alertmanager

Terraform

Secrets management

Tools

Helm

Terraform

Vault

Sealed Secrets

External Secrets Operator

Job description

The Senior Platform Engineer role at the company focuses on championing the deployment architecture for our Kubernetes platform, with hands-on responsibility for CI/CD pipelines, guardrails, and migration strategies in an on-premise estate. You will collaborate with TechOps and engineering teams to modernise deployment and scale workloads.

You will drive Kubernetes standardisation, containerisation of existing workloads, and the development of self-service runbooks, while owning observability