Platform Engineer

3 Month intiial contract, scope for extension

Inside IR35, 550-600 a day

Location: Southampton - 2 x a week on site

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Platform Engineer with strong DevOps leadership capability to support the design, delivery and continuous improvement of secure, scalable and resilient cloud platforms across Azure and AWS environments. The role will focus on building and governing cloud architecture patterns, landing zones, infrastructure standards and automation practices, while working closely with engineering, security, product and delivery teams.
The successful candidate will provide manager-level technical leadership across DevOps, cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, networking, security, observability and reliability engineering. They will help shape enterprise-scale transformation, hybrid cloud strategy and platform services aligned to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, ensuring solutions are robust, cost-effective and operationally ready.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, delivery and evolution of cloud platform architecture, DevOps operating models, landing zones, guardrails and engineering standards across Azure and AWS.
• Provide technical oversight across cloud infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, identity, security and platform services.
• Develop, review and govern Infrastructure as Code standards using Terraform, ARM, Bicep and Ansible, including reusable modules, state management and deployment pipelines.
• Lead CI/CD practices using Azure DevOps, Jenkins and GitLab, ensuring reliable, secure and repeatable platform deployments across multiple environments.
• Assess and implement platform improvements including provider upgrades, disaster recovery, high availability, resilience, monitoring, observability and cost optimisation.
• Lead technical design activities for platform refactoring, environment creation, container platform access, identity integration and secure connectivity.
• Support cloud networking and security patterns including private connectivity, access control, edge services, WAF, CDN and Zero Trust principles.
• Collaborate with delivery teams, security, shared services and product groups to ensure platform designs are aligned, governed and fit for purpose.
• Review technical documentation, design decisions and RFCs to ensure quality, consistency and architectural compliance.
• Promote engineering best practice across automation, observability, reliability, performance, operational readiness and Azure Well-Architected Framework principles.

Required Skills and Experience

• 10+ years' experience in DevOps, cloud engineering, platform engineering or cloud architecture roles, ideally including manager-level technical leadership.
• Deep knowledge of Microsoft Azure services, including networking, App Services, Functions, API Management, container registries, VNets, Private Endpoints, identity and security.
• Strong experience working across AWS, Azure and/or hybrid cloud environments, with the ability to design scalable, secure and governed multi-cloud platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools including Terraform, ARM, Bicep and Ansible, covering module development, pipelines and state management.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD practices using tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab and GitHub Actions.
• Experience with container platforms and Kubernetes-based architectures, ideally including Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, security architecture, disaster recovery, high availability, monitoring, logging, autoscaling and observability using tools such as Grafana and Prometheus.
• Proficient in scripting and automation using PowerShell, Python, Shell and Groovy to reduce manual effort and improve platform reliability.
• Experience designing and implementing Azure Landing Zones aligned to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, including governance, identity, security, networking and operational controls.
• Working knowledge of edge, traffic management and security services such as Cloudflare, CDN and WAF technologies.
• Ability to translate complex technical requirements into clear, practical platform designs and engineering standards.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical teams.