Principal Platform Engineer NEW

Bristol, Gloucestershire
SF Partners

Lead Platform Engineer / Principal Platform Engineer

Salary: £90,000 – £110,000 + benefits
Location: UK Wide Hybrid Working
Offices: Bristol, Woking, Worthing, St Paul’s London
Security Clearance: SC cleared or SC eligible required

Up to 6 days per month in office.

We are supporting a major Platform Engineering growth programme delivering secure, cloud-native platforms across some of the UK’s largest and most complex technology environments.

These platforms underpin critical digital services used at a national scale, supporting modern engineering teams working across cloud, data, security, automation and public sector transformation.

This opportunity is aimed at experienced Platform Engineers, Technical Leads, Principal Engineers and strong Platform SMEs who have operated at scale and wish to influence how large organisations build, deploy and operate software.

You will remain hands-on while having genuine influence over platform direction, engineering standards, governance, reliability and developer experience.

What you’ll be doing

• Design, build and improve secure cloud platforms, internal developer platforms and reusable engineering capabilities across complex client environments.
• Design secure multi-account AWS landing zones and cloud platforms.
• Build internal developer platforms and self-service capabilities.
• Design and operate production-grade Kubernetes platforms, including EKS, AKS or OpenShift.
• Define engineering standards, golden paths, reusable modules and platform patterns.
• Build observability strategies using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry and modern APM tooling.
• Improve reliability through SLOs, incident reviews and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practises.
• Embed DevSecOps, supply-chain security and secure CI/CD practises.
• Drive cloud-native modernisation and legacy transformation.
• Support FinOps and cloud optimisation across large estates.
• Lead design reviews, technical workshops and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate closely with architects, engineering teams and senior stakeholders to solve complex platform challenges.

What we’re looking for

Strong experience across several of the following areas:

• AWS cloud platforms.
• Kubernetes, ideally EKS, AKS or OpenShift.
• Terraform or Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• CI/CD automation.
• GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or Flux.
• Internal Developer Platforms or self-service engineering.
• Observability tools including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Datadog, Dynatrace or New Relic.
• DevSecOps and supply-chain security.
• SRE practises, SLOs, SLIs and incident management.
• Platform governance, cloud standards or landing zones.
• FinOps and cost optimisation.

We are particularly interested in candidates who have worked in large-scale enterprise, financial services, telecoms, retail, defence, public sector, travel, media or other highly regulated environments.

This role could suit a technical lead, a hands-on architect, a senior platform engineer ready to progress, or a deep SME in Kubernetes, AWS, observability, cloud platforms or developer enablement.

Why this role?

• Work on genuinely national-scale digital services.
• Join a strong Platform Engineering community.
• Solve complex cloud and reliability challenges.
• Influence engineering direction rather than simply delivering requirements.
• Remain hands-on while operating at a senior level.
• Clear progression into Lead, Principal or Architecture career pathways.