Platform Engineer

Department: Technology Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office) Reports to: Head of Engineering Hours: 37.5 per week Salary: (Depending on experience) Role Overview This is a new role, and a pioneering one. We are investing in platform engineering as a discipline. You won’t just be keeping the lights on, but actively improving how our engineers work: faster feedback loops, better tooling, smoother development workflows, and a foundation that scales with the business. As the Platform Engineer at Cambridge Spark, you will work closely with our existing infrastructure engineer and directly with the Head of Engineering to shape this capability from the ground up. It is a hands-on technical role; you will be writing code and building things, not just advising on them. Key responsibilities: - Own and evolve our GCP-based platform alongside the existing infrastructure engineer, increasing resilience and reducing single points of failure - Establish developer experience as a discipline — audit where engineering time is lost, and systematically improve it through better tooling, automation, and process - Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, local development environments, and internal tooling that make the engineering team faster and more confident - Introduce infrastructure-as-code and platform engineering best practices where they are missing or immature - Collaborate across engineering, product, and curriculum teams to understand where platform limitations are creating friction - Contribute to our AI tooling adoption — we are an AI company and expect our engineering practice to reflect that - Work with the Head of Engineering to set technical direction for the platform, with genuine influence over decisions - Secure Infrastructure - We have a lot of data that needs to be secured according to standards - Monitor Infra - Monitor infrastructure performance and errors and make fixes independently Candidate Specification: **Technical skillset:Essential** - Solid, hands-on cloud platform experience (we use GCP) - Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) - A track record of meaningfully improving CI/CD pipelines - Familiarity with the developer experience space: local dev tooling, observability, internal platforms, and similar - Comfortable across the platform stack rather than deeply specialised in a single area; we are not at a scale that rewards narrow expertise - Exposure to Kubernetes clusters - Solid Linux experience - Comfortable with CLI and debugging servers via SSH - Comfortable with scripting (e.g. bash) **Desirable** - Experience with Python-based software and environments - Experience with data-heavy engineering environments - Working with Kubernetes custom resource definitions and creating operators - Comfortable with Automation tools such as Ansible ### Ways of Working: - Generalist instinct: you reach for the right tool rather than your favourite one, and you are comfortable operating across a broad remit - Pioneer mindset: you have seen good platform and DX culture somewhere, whether that’s in a large best-in-class org, or a smaller company where you’ve built it from scratch. You want to build it somewhere new — you do not need a playbook handed to you - Self-starter: if you see a problem, you just fix it if it’s small. If the fix is large or high-risk, you communicate what the problem is, and why it needs careful design. - Resilient: you thrive when building something new, where tactical priorities change but we have a consistent end goal. - Collaborative but confident: you build trust with peers through competence and consistency, and you hold your ground when you need to - Pragmatic about AI: We support AI-assisted development. We care more about outcomes than which tools you use, so we give you the models to use (or not) as you see fit. - Communicative: you surface problems early, document your thinking, and keep stakeholders appropriately informed without being prompte…