{"id":1953079,"url":"https://alion.io/job/the-key-group-senior-platform-engineer","title":"Senior Platform Engineer","company":{"id":2214532,"name":"The Key Group","domain":"thekeygroup.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/thekeygroup","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":null},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":80000,"max":90000,"currency":"GBP","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":118755},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Blue-Green Deployment","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"PHP","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Chaos Engineering","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-06T10:56:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-11T18:04:09Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"Location: Remote - UK\nSalary: £80,000 - £90,000\nAbout us\nAt Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.\nWe believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.\nOur MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.\nAt the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.\nAbout the role\nWe are looking for an experienced and collaborative Senior Platform Engineer to join our Engineering team and help us take strong ownership of platform components and contribute to the design of robust, scalable, and secure systems. The remit and focus of the role is to work alongside the Platform Tech Lead and Engineering Manager to deliver high-quality engineering work, support fellow engineers, and help embed a culture of reliability and operational excellence. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re highly technical and a good team player, this is the role for you.\nCore responsibilities\nArchitectural Contribution: Contribute to system design and architecture decisions, working with the Tech Lead to balance trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security.\nReliability and Performance: Take ownership of services from design through to production, ensuring they are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Identify and deliver improvements in platform reliability, performance, and efficiency.\nAutomation: Take an automation first approach to improving automation across infrastructure and operations to reduce toil and increase the team's velocity.\nTechnical Standards: Apply and uphold coding standards, write well-tested and reusable code, and engage with the architecture community to share best practices. Enable AI agents to act as force multipliers within our codebase. Ensure services meet production readiness standards.\nPlanning and Delivery: Provide accurate estimates and feasibility input on technical work. Deliver work iteratively, contribute to release planning, and participate in post-release reviews. Raise dependencies within planned work.\nMentorship: Support and mentor fellow engineers through code review, pairing, and constructive feedback. Share knowledge generously across the team.\nIncident Response: Participate in on-call rotations and incident response. Lead investigations, contribute to post-mortems, and drive follow-up improvements.\nCollaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, the Tech Lead, and other engineers to align technical delivery with product strategy. Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. \nRequirements\nExperience: Considerable professional experience in Platform Engineering on complex, scalable systems.\nCloud Systems: Strong hands-on expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures.\nPlatform Scale: Experience operating platforms serving high request volumes in production with traffic of at least 6,000 req’s/sec. A deep understanding of enterprise deployment and maintenance processes such as blue-green deployments.\nInfrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools.\nScripting: Strong skills in Python, Go, or a similar language for automation and tooling.\nProgramming: Significant experience working in Java, C++/#, PHP, or another language; preferably in a sizable Object Oriented codebase.\nObservability: Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., DataDog, Prometheus, or equivalent), and incident/problem management practices.\nSystem Design: Solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and resilience patterns.\nContainerisation: Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS).\nCI/CD: Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments.\nMentorship: Experience supporting and mentoring fellow engineers through code review, pairing, and feedback.\nAI and Productivity: Experience using agentic AI, or an interest in increasing productivity with new tooling including agentic AI.\nBonus Skills\nExperience with chaos engineering and reliability testing.\nKnowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks.\nContributions to open-source projects or the software community.\nExperience running ECS at scale.\nExperience working with (agentic and generative) AI to increase productivity.\nBenefits\nThe chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:\nA dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!\n32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas\nLife Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary\nComprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks \nPrivate Dental Insurance with Bupa \nSalary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows\nEnhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay\n5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!\nAccess to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) \nAll of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you\nSocial committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success\nDedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)\nVolunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year\nDog friendly offices!\nInterview process\nPhone screen\n1st stage\n2nd stage","description_format":"text","description_chars":6535,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Annual leave","Dental insurance","Flexible schedule","Pet friendly","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-06T10:56:33Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":33,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":118755,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-key-group-senior-platform-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-key-group-senior-platform-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T20:29:45Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":8545,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2214532},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2214532"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fthe-key-group-senior-platform-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fthe-key-group-senior-platform-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fthe-key-group-senior-platform-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/the-key-group-senior-platform-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthe-key-group-senior-platform-engineer"}]}