Staff Platform Engineer – UK

About the Opportunity

We are representing a fast-growing SaaS company in the UK that is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to build and scale their infrastructure. Our client serves thousands of enterprise customers and is experiencing rapid year-over-year growth. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at an inflection point where your decisions will have direct impact on their ability to scale.

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you'll own projects end-to-end with minimal oversight. You'll work on challenging problems like optimizing custom SQL compilers, implementing automated security guardrails, building deployment infrastructure for canary releases and feature flags, defining SLOs, and supporting event-driven architecture. This role requires someone who can balance reliability with flexibility and make good technical decisions under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Own platform engineering projects from conception through delivery, including technical design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance
• Build and maintain infrastructure that enables product engineers to ship features quickly and safely
• Optimize database performance and advise engineering teams on data modeling best practices
• Create automated guardrails for security and privacy of customer data
• Implement deployment infrastructure including canary deploys, gradual rollouts, and feature flags
• Work with stakeholders to define service level objectives and implement corresponding indicators
• Ensure external service integrations support retries and circuit-breakers
• Build infrastructure to support event-driven architecture and data warehousing
• Participate in on-call rotation and respond to infrastructure incidents
• Communicate technical decisions and best practices through written documentation
• Review code and contribute to the application codebase alongside product engineers

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Proven experience building infrastructure at scale, handling millions of data points
• Strong coding skills with the ability to contribute to application-level code, not just infrastructure
• Deep knowledge of infrastructure automation, provisioning, monitoring, and release processes
• Comfort with database technologies and SQL optimization
• Experience making independent technical decisions and taking ownership of outcomes
• Strong written communication skills for asynchronous collaboration
• Self-directed project management ability without requiring external prodding
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate and manage technical risk

Technical environment (experience not required, but helpful):

• TypeScript, Node.js, React, GraphQL
• PostgreSQL, Redis
• AWS, Kubernetes
• Datadog, Sentry
• Infrastructure-as-code practices

This role is ideal for someone who:

• Gets deeply obsessed with complex problems until they make sense
• Advocates for edge cases and long-term maintainability
• Enjoys variety and solving diverse technical challenges (database optimization, security, Kubernetes debugging, application performance)
• Thrives with minimal process and high autonomy
• Prefers asynchronous, written communication over constant meetings

This role is not a good fit if you:

• Prefer having a manager make final technical decisions
• Want to focus purely on infrastructure without touching application code
• Rely heavily on synchronous meetings to communicate
• Need external project management and regular check-ins

How We Work With You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai has been engaged to identify exceptional platform engineers for this confidential search. Here's how the process works:

1. Apply through the Get A Job.ai platform with your CV and a brief note about your platform engineering experience
2. Our recruiter will screen your application and conduct an initial conversation to understand your background and goals
3. If there's a strong match, we'll submit your profile to our client for consideration
4. Our client's interview process includes: introduction call with the hiring manager, technical pairing session in their codebase, and three technical interviews covering design, incident debugging, and infrastructure (no leetcode or whiteboard exercises)
5. Throughout the process, you'll have a dedicated point of contact preparing you for each stage

Please do not attempt to contact the employer directly. All applications must come through Get A Job.ai to be considered. We advocate for you throughout the hiring process and provide feedback at every stage.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on experience level and location within the UK.

Equal Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to fair and transparent recruiting practices. We provide equal employment opportunities to all candidates regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.