Principal Platform Engineer

The Role

The Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer has deep expertise in building and operating digital and data products, particularly within complex client environments and multi-team projects. This role plays a key part in delivering high-quality outcomes through strategic influence, hands-on support, and deep domain knowledge. You will collaborate closely with Principal Product and Delivery roles, as well as Technical and Delivery Leads, to ensure that technology choices align with both client goals and Red Badger’s value propositions. You will engage with the wider team and stakeholders to consult and influence on topics such as technology adoption, continuous delivery, team structure, deployment strategy, and organisational policy. Your ability to guide clients through emerging technologies and industry best practice will help create the conditions for teams to succeed with autonomy and impact. 

As a Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer, you elevate those around you by supercharging delivery teams, mentoring others, and embedding technical excellence at every level. You bring thought leadership, pragmatism, and curiosity to solving complex problems, and are trusted to represent Red Badger in high-level client conversations with confidence and clarity.

Hands-on work is expected to be the majority of the role - demonstrating by doing, but also be prepared to get involved in thought leadership, sharing your knowledge with other badgers, and high value consulting activities.

Key responsibilities

Discipline expertise 

• Supporting lean approach to software delivery and overall solution design and focus on delivering maximum value with minimal effort 
• Providing architectural framework and solution design 
• Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology where appropriate 
• Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code 
• Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice 
• Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset 
• Upskilling Red Badger software engineers in new technologies and approaches 
• Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger 

Collaborative leadership 

• Feed into account level technology leadership / governance 
• Contributing to the overall success of the Red Badger client engagement 
• Potentially leading multiple technology teams across a programme of work 
• Aligning Badger / client teams on appropriate processes & tooling 

Influencing our clients 

• Consulting on areas of technology expertise 
• Operating as trusted advisor consulting on client technology strategy, technology roadmap Coaching senior client technology stakeholders 

It’d be great if you have 

• Experience with the following tools and technologies:
  • Terraform
  • FLUX
  • Kyverno
  • Istio
  • Github Actions

• Prometheus/OTEL
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms - especially AWS., and understanding of progressive ways of managing infrastructure, such as infrastructure-as-code,
• Extensive experience with container/image management and orchestration tools such as Docker, K8s/EKS
• Experience with setting up modern CI/CD pipelines to support continuous delivery and deployment and good understanding of the trade-offs (e.g. pipelines-as-code, monorepos, GitOps, branching and release strategies, etc.)
• An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions (e.g. PCI, GDPR…)
• Experience in design and testing strategies to enable gradual evolution of systems over time
• Good understanding of data storage approaches and tools and trade-offs involved (RBDMSs, key-value stores, column stores, log storage, …)
• Good understanding of applying cryptography in software development (e.g. TLS, PKI, HMAC, hashing algorithms, etc.)
• Experience in a consulting environment with client engagements
• Ability to influence senior client stakeholders and support teams with technology and process enablers to support continuous delivery and DevOps ways of working
• Experience with establishing good engineering practice focused on lean, cross-discipline, continuous delivery 

It’d be amazing if you can also 

• An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions 
• Experience with running live services with significant volume of users and establishing appropriate SLOs and error budgets for services and applications 
• Experience designing observability strategies for systems with multiple components

What we offer

We make sure our team is well looked after with generous salaries and a great benefits package which includes:

• Annual £2,000 training budget
• Enhanced pension with employer contribution of up to 5% of your salary
• Group Life Insurance
• Income Replacement Benefit
• Critical Illness Cover
• Private Medical Insurance
• Your choice of hardware and mobile phone
• £1,000 home-office set up budget and contribution to home broadband
• Matched (pre-tax) charity GAYE donations
• Cycle to work
• Enhanced parental leave

Red Badger Values:

1. People people
   We respect and care for each other, giving us the space to be our true selves.
2. Find a way
   We’re comfortable with uncertainty, and want to take ownership for outcomes, which we are proactive in delivering.
3. Always learning
   We’re curious. It’s how we learn and grow as individuals, continuously testing and improving what we do, and how we do it.
4. Open & Fair
   We build trust by telling things as they are, being open, and seeking to achieve fair and equitable outcomes.
5. Collaborative
   We are united by our desire to get to the best ideas.  We are generous with our knowledge, actively listen to each other, and are open minded.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and it is our fundamental belief that the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue to do amazing work for our clients.