Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

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, the Principal Platform Engineer 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 platform reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational efficiency; identifying opportunities to reduce engineering friction and accelerate software delivery; establishing engineering principles and guardrails to maintain 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 architectural decisions; mentoring engineers and promoting strong platform engineering practices; and championing a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

About AND Digital
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 digital teams through close regional relationships. With over 1,300 people across the UK and Europe and plans for global expansion, we foster a culture of collaboration, ambition, curiosity, and fun to drive innovation and problem-solving.

We offer opportunities to work on impactful projects with major clients, a blended working model allowing flexibility between home, clubhouse, and client sites, a dedicated career scrum team to support your development, an annual training budget with allocated study days, regular team socials, and a safe environment to be yourself and challenge yourself.

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.
- Expertise in infrastructure as code, automated cloud provisioning, CI/CD, and automation of operational processes.
- Designing platforms for resilience, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence.
- Applying SRE principles to improve availability and reduce operational risk.
- Leading complex technical initiatives and providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.
- Mentoring senior and developing engineers and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and technical excellence.

About you
You are a technically strong leader who can influence architecture and technical direction without relying solely on organisational authority. You thrive in ambiguity, enjoy mentoring others, and champion automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence. You are passionate about improving developer experience and accelerating software delivery through platform engineering.

Qualifications
While specific qualifications are not detailed, a strong background in platform engineering, cloud-native architecture, infrastructure automation, and technical leadership is essential.