DevOps Platform Engineer - Northampton, UK

Job summary

The Platform Engineer builds and supports deployment automation and operational controls for entitlement authorization and event-driven services. The role develops GitLab CI/CD pipelines, Helm configurations, and Docker environments, while embedding security, observability, and reliability practices across Java services, Apache Kafka, and distributed systems. It also improves deployment resilience, performance, and operational quality in collaboration with engineering, security, architecture, and operations teams.

Benefits

Qualifications

• Experience in platform engineering, DevOps engineering, or site reliability engineering.
• Expertise in GitLab CI/CD pipeline engineering, release automation, and artifact promotion.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes or OpenShift.
• Knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, including troubleshooting deployments and runtime issues.
• Experience monitoring and troubleshooting Apache Kafka and event-driven systems.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with structured logging, distributed tracing, W3C Trace Context, and application monitoring.
• Knowledge of security scanning, code quality controls, container security, and dependency management in CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience supporting distributed systems in enterprise production environments.
• Familiarity with test-driven development and automated quality assurance.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools with appropriate governance and validation.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Knowledge of Vault or enterprise secrets management platforms.
• Knowledge of SRE principles, service level indicators, service level objectives, and operational resilience.
• Experience supporting regulated environments in banking, financial services, insurance, or the public sector.
• Familiarity with service meshes, API gateways, policy enforcement platforms, and authorization frameworks.
• Knowledge of cloud-native architecture and modern platform engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines for builds, testing, security scanning, artifact promotion, and multi-environment deployments.
• Develop Helm charts and reusable deployment configurations for Java services, OPA, Envoy, and platform components.
• Build, maintain, and troubleshoot Docker images, Docker Compose environments, container networking, and runtime configurations.
• Implement observability using metrics, dashboards, alerting, structured logging, and distributed tracing.
• Integrate security and quality controls, including vulnerability, container, and dependency scanning.
• Automate secure configuration management, secrets handling, certificate deployment, and compliance evidence generation.
• Design deployment resilience measures, including rollback mechanisms, circuit breakers, high availability, and disaster recovery controls.
• Support performance tuning, capacity planning, and operational optimization across policy engines, event streaming platforms, and application services.
• Collaborate with engineering, security, architecture, and operations teams to deliver secure, scalable platform capabilities.
• Promote DevOps practices, automation, and continuous improvement.

Skills

Industry

Relocation