Principal Platform Engineer

Location: London - 2 Gresham Street

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

We're hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to be a senior technical anchor in our Platform/Operations function. This is a 70% hands-on engineering role: you'll design, build, and operate the infrastructure that keeps a global trading platform running, while acting as a technical mentor and design authority across the wider team.

A core part of this role is leading our adoption of AI within operations — using LLM-based tooling, agentic workflows, and automation to reduce toil, accelerate incident response, and raise the operational leverage of the whole department. We're not looking for someone to write a strategy deck about AI; we're looking for someone who will build with it.

What you'll do

Platform & cloud engineering (the 70%)

• Design, build, and operate infrastructure across AWS (VPC, networking, EKS), Azure (AKS, AKV, networking), with an understand of on-prem environments

• Own core networking design and implementation across within Cloud environments — connectivity, routing, DNS, load balancing, firewalls, and private links between cloud and on-prem

• Engineer for high availability: multi-region and multi-AZ architectures, failover design, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for a platform where downtime has direct market impact

• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar), CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes platforms as products consumed by engineering teams

SRE & reliability

• Define and drive SLOs, error budgets, and observability standards (metrics, logging, tracing) across the platform

• Take part in post-incident reviews and help with the resulting reliability work to completion

• Continuously reduce toil through automation — if we've done it manually twice, you're already scripting it

AI-driven operations

• Identify, prototype, and productionise AI-assisted workflows across the department: incident triage and summarisation, runbook automation, log/alert analysis, change-risk assessment, internal knowledge tooling

• Use AI-assisted engineering tools (Copilot, or equivalents) as a first-class part of your own workflow, and coach the team to do the same safely and effectively

• Establish sensible guardrails for AI use in a regulated, availability-critical environment, knowing when automation should act and when it should recommend

Technical leadership (the 30%)

• Act as a mentor to engineers across the Platform and Operations teams, raising the bar on design, code, and operational practice

• Be a design authority on cross-team projects: review architectures, challenge assumptions, and ensure new services are built to be operable, observable, and resilient from day one

• Contribute to the technical roadmap for the platform function, balancing reliability investment against delivery

What we're looking for

Must have

• A background in Operations or SRE running highly available, redundant production platforms — you understand failure domains, graceful degradation, and what "five nines" costs

• Deep hands-on experience with AWS (VPC design, networking, EKS) and Azure (AKS, Key Vault, networking) — genuinely multi-cloud, not one cloud plus a certification

• Strong Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing concepts, firewalls, load balancing, hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect / ExpressRoute, VPNs)

• Production Kubernetes experience at scale, including day-2 operations (upgrades, capacity, security, multi-cluster)

• Infrastructure-as-code and automation as a default working style (Terraform, Ansible, or similar; strong scripting in Python, Go, or Bash)

• Demonstrable, practical use of AI tooling to improve engineering or operational workflows — you can show us something you've automated, accelerated, or de-toiled with it

• The credibility and communication skills to mentor senior engineers and influence design decisions without formal authority

• Understanding of different database technologies 

Nice to have

• Experience in trading, exchanges, market data, fintech, or another latency- and availability-sensitive domain

Trayport is committed to creating and sustaining a collegial work environment in which all individuals are treated with dignity and respect and one which reflects the diversity of the community in which we operate. We provide accommodations for applicants and employees who require it.