Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive, dependent on experience

About the Role
The Principal Platform Engineer will provide technical leadership in shaping, evolving, and scaling our clients' cloud platform. This role focuses on establishing robust, reusable platform capabilities and self-service solutions that enable engineering teams to deliver software faster, more reliably, and with a consistently high developer experience. Operating across architecture, engineering, reliability, automation, and developer enablement, you will influence technical strategy while remaining hands-on in the design and delivery of platform capabilities.

Key responsibilities include defining and evolving the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for an AWS cloud platform; designing and building scalable, secure, resilient, and reusable platform capabilities; developing self-service tooling and services to abstract operational complexity and improve developer productivity; driving automation across infrastructure, application delivery, operational processes, and platform management; establishing and promoting platform standards, engineering patterns, and best practices; improving reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational efficiency; identifying opportunities to reduce engineering friction and accelerate software delivery; establishing engineering principles and guardrails to balance speed with security, reliability, and governance; leading complex platform initiatives from discovery through implementation and operational adoption; influencing engineering teams and senior stakeholders on platform strategy and technology choices; mentoring engineers to raise capability and promote strong platform engineering practices; and championing a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

AND Digital is a tech company dedicated to accelerating digital delivery and closing the digital skills gap. Since 2014, we have helped organisations build better digital products and stronger teams through close regional relationships and a unique 'Clubs' model. With over 1,300 people across the UK and Europe and plans for global expansion, we offer a collaborative, ambitious, and fun environment where innovation thrives.

Experience
- Significant experience in platform engineering, including designing and operating internal developer platforms at scale.
- Building reusable platform services, tooling, and self-service capabilities.
- Applying platform-as-a-product principles to improve developer experience.
- Establishing standards and paved-road approaches enabling engineering teams to work independently.
- Designing highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud-native architectures.
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, identity, and security.
- Making architectural trade-offs across reliability, scalability, performance, cost, and developer experience.
- Infrastructure as Code and automated cloud provisioning.
- CI/CD and automated software delivery.
- Automation of operational processes and platform lifecycle management.
- Establishing repeatable, standardised engineering workflows.
- Designing platforms for resilience, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence.
- Applying SRE principles to improve availability and reduce operational risk.
- Performance analysis, capacity planning, scalability engineering, and proactive reliability improvement.
- Establishing meaningful service-level objectives, monitoring, alerting, and operational practices.
- Providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams or wider organisations.
- Influencing architecture and technical direction without relying solely on organisational authority.
- Leading complex technical initiatives and driving decisions through ambiguity.
- Mentoring senior and developing engineers and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and technical excellence.

About you
You are a technically strong, hands-on leader passionate about platform engineering and developer experience. You thrive in complex environments, enjoy influencing strategy and architecture, and are committed to continuous improvement and operational excellence. You are collaborative, proactive, and able to mentor and inspire engineers at all levels. You embrace AND Digital’s values of wonder, share, and delight, and are motivated by working in a culture that values curiosity, ambition, and fun.

Qualifications
While no specific qualifications are mandated, demonstrable experience and a proven track record in platform engineering, cloud-native architecture, automation, and technical leadership are essential for success in this role.