Principal Platform Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Bristol, Somerset, Bristol, UK, Hybrid

Key areas of responsibility

• Defining the technical architecture and long-term direction of Rowden’s internal developer platform (IDP). 
• Leading the design and evolution of IDP capabilities, including self-service provisioning and deployment workflows. 
• Defining the platform's approach to agentic AI, establishing the patterns, guardrails, and runtime infrastructure required to deploy and operate AI agents reliably across the organisation.
• Setting standards for API-first architectures that enable interoperability between systems, services, and external partners. 
• Owning the design and governance of CI/CD pipelines to support consistent, secure, and efficient software delivery across the organisation. 
• Driving the adoption of modular platform capabilities that allow teams to compose and extend functionality at scale. 
• Owning infrastructure-as-code standards and automation practices to ensure repeatability, scalability, and reliability. 
• Embedding security, compliance, and best practices into the platform by design, and ensuring these are sustained as the platform evolves. 
• Defining and maintaining platform standards, patterns, and reusable components that drive consistency across teams. 
• Leading improvements to observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities across systems and services. 
• Mentoring and developing engineers across the organisation, raising the collective standard of platform engineering practice. 
• Identifying and driving strategic opportunities to improve developer experience, reducing friction and cognitive load at an organisational level. 

Key skills, experience and behaviours

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating engineering platforms at scale. 
• Deep understanding of platform engineering principles, including infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, system design, service integration, and platform product thinking. 
• Experience designing platforms that support agentic AI workloads, including the infrastructure and integration patterns required for autonomous task execution, tool use, and model orchestration at scale. 
• Proven experience defining API strategies and building integration layers between complex systems. 
• Extensive experience with using systems like Kubernetes, Terraform, and FluxCD in production scenarios. 
• Strong understanding of modular platform design, composable architectures, and long-term platform scalability. 
• Expertise in observability tooling - logging, metrics, and tracing 
• Deep knowledge of secure-by-design and zero-trust principles, with experience applying these at an architectural level. 
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (e.g. Python, Go, or similar) to design and deliver platform tooling and automation. 
• Deep empathy for engineering experience and a strong desire to improve it. 
• Experience providing technical leadership across cross-functional teams, influencing direction and building alignment around shared outcomes. 

• Mission-Focused: You care about enabling others to do their best work and delivering meaningful outcomes. 
• Relentless: You take ownership and see problems through to resolution. 
• Collaborative: You work effectively across teams, building trust and shared understanding. 
• Quality-Driven: You take pride in building robust, scalable, and maintainable systems. 
• Pragmatic: You focus on solutions that work in practice, not just in theory. 
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously learn, improve, and embrace new approaches where they add value, particularly in fast-moving areas like AI and platform integration. 

Working at Rowden