Principal Platform Engineer (12 Month FTC)

Principal Platform Engineer - 12 Month FTC

Who We Are:

AND Digital are a tech company focused on accelerating digital delivery and dedicated to closing the digital skills gap. We’ve been helping organisations build better digital products and stronger digital teams since 2014.

We believe our work should always leave a legacy for the client. We do this through close relationships with our offices (or ‘Clubs’) so that our partners are always prioritised by a regional team close to them.

This unique model has driven success for our clients and ourselves, evidenced by our remarkable organic growth since 2014. Today we number more than 1,300 people with Clubs all over the UK and Europe with plans for global expansion in the next couple of years.

Join us - and help us fulfil our mission to close the world’s digital skills gap.

The Role

The Principal Platform Engineer will provide technical leadership in shaping, evolving, and scaling our clients cloud platform. The role will establish robust, reusable platform capabilities and self-service solutions that enable engineering teams to deliver software faster, more reliably, and with a consistently high developer experience.

The Principal Platform Engineer will operate across architecture, engineering, reliability, automation, and developer enablement, influencing technical strategy while remaining hands-on in the design and delivery of platform capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for a AWS cloud platform.
• Design and build scalable, secure, resilient, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Develop self-service tooling and services that abstract operational complexity and improve developer productivity.
• Drive automation across infrastructure, application delivery, operational processes, and platform management.
• Establish and promote platform standards, engineering patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational efficiency of the platform.
• Identify opportunities to reduce engineering friction, eliminate repetitive work, and accelerate software delivery.
• Establish engineering principles and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining appropriate levels of security, reliability, and governance.
• Lead technically complex platform initiatives from discovery and architectural design through implementation and operational adoption.
• Influence engineering teams and senior stakeholders on platform strategy, architectural decisions, and technology choices.
• Mentor and develop engineers, raising engineering capability and promoting strong platform engineering practices.
• Champion a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

Experience and Technical Capability

We are particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate significant experience in:

Platform Engineering

• Designing and operating internal developer platforms at scale.
• Building reusable platform services, tooling, and self-service capabilities.
• Applying platform-as-a-product principles to improve developer experience.
• Establishing standards and paved-road approaches that enable engineering teams to work independently.

Cloud-Native Architecture

• Designing highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud-native architectures.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, identity, and security.
• Experience making architectural trade-offs across reliability, scalability, performance, cost, and developer experience.

Infrastructure & Delivery Automation

• Infrastructure as Code and automated cloud provisioning.
• CI/CD and automated software delivery.
• Automation of operational processes and platform lifecycle management.
• Experience establishing repeatable, standardised engineering workflows.

Reliability & Performance Engineering

• Designing platforms for resilience, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence.
• Applying SRE principles and practices to improve availability and reduce operational risk.
• Performance analysis, capacity planning, scalability engineering, and proactive reliability improvement.
• Establishing meaningful service-level objectives, monitoring, alerting, and operational practices.

Technical Leadership

• Providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams or a wider engineering organisation.
• Influencing architecture and technical direction without relying solely on organisational authority.
• Leading complex technical initiatives and driving decisions through ambiguity.
• Mentoring senior and developing engineers and creating a culture of knowledge sharing and technical excellence.

Why join AND Digital?

We have three values: wonder, share, and delight. These values inform how we work with clients, and our culture: what it feels like to work for AND. We believe collaboration, ambition, curiosity and fun can drive innovation by creating a better environment for problem-solving.

By joining AND, we’ll provide:

• Opportunities to work on projects with big clients and the chance to produce meaningful work that makes a difference to people’s lives.
• A “Blended Working” model, meaning you will be able to work in a range of locations from; your home, in your clubhouse, on a client, as well as just a change of scenery.
• A dedicated career scrum team, designed to help you reach your career goals and develop the skills you need to be your best self.
• An annual budget for training and upskilling, including allocated days off so you don’t have to study in your own free time.
• Monthly and quarterly team socials - on us - ranging from after work drinks, to driving experience days with your fellow club members.
• A safe environment for you to be yourself and challenge yourself.

Equal Opportunities Statement

At AND Digital we embrace diversity and are committed to equal opportunities. We are actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you require any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process so please speak to our recruitment team.