Platform Engineer

As a Platform Engineer, you will play a crucial role in shaping the technological foundation of our company.

Your work will be essential in improving our technology landscape by increasing standardization, consistency, and efficiency.

You'll work on creating and maintaining the core tools, frameworks, and infrastructure that empower our development teams to build and deploy software efficiently and reliably. This role is a blend of technical expertise and collaborative problem-solving, requiring a forward-thinking mindset and a passion for improving not only the developer experience, but the experience of the entire technology department, making us a well-oiled machine.

Key Responsibilities

• Standardization & Automation: Design and build reusable infrastructure-as-code templates and CI/CD pipelines to ensure consistency and accelerate development across all teams.
• Improving Visibility & Observability: Help create and maintain a single source of truth for our technology ecosystem, including a central application directory, system diagrams, and standardized monitoring and alerting dashboards.
• Enhancing Reliability: Work to improve system reliability by helping to define key metrics, implement robust monitoring solutions, and support the development of a company-wide backup and business continuity plan.
• Collaboration & Governance: Collaborate with technical teams to understand their needs, provide guidance and (automated) enforcement on best practices, and establish clear ownership and governance models for software and infrastructure.

Required Skills And Experience

• Cloud Expertise: Proven experience with a major cloud provider, with a strong preference for AWS.
• Cloud Infrastructure: A basic, working understanding of cloud infrastructure concepts (e.g., virtual machines, networking, storage, and databases) is required.
• Infrastructure as Code: Hands-on experience with IaC tools. AWS CDK experience is highly desired.
• CI/CD: Familiarity with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using various tools.
• Collaboration: Strong communication and interpersonal skills. You can effectively explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Agile Mindset: Experience working in an Agile development environment. Refining tickets, estimating work and breaking user stories down into smaller tasks.

What Success Looks Like (The First Year)

As a Founding Member Of The Platform Engineering Team, Your Impact Will Be a Key Part Of Our Department's Transformation. Within Your First Year, We Expect To See Tangible Progress On Our Core Initiatives, Specifically

• Centralized Visibility: You will help establish a central application directory that provides a clear, high-level overview of our technology ecosystem, including component ownership.
• System Documentation: You will contribute to creating an interactive, visual representation of our applications and infrastructure, clarifying how they interoperate. Our aim is to provide a single source of truth for the entire department.
• Infrastructure Governance: You will be heavily involved in the effort to identify and eliminate all inefficient applications and infrastructure, improving overall security and cost management.
• Enhanced Reliability: You will play a key role in developing a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) playbook for the company's core applications, significantly improving our resilience.

Desirable Skills (Bonus)

• Prior experience in a dedicated Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or DevOps role.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with a variety of monitoring and logging tools and strategies (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK Stack).

About You
You are a pragmatic, curious, and collaborative engineer who sees the bigger picture. You understand that technology is a tool to solve business problems and are driven by the desire to make things better, not just for today but for the long term. You find satisfaction in building systems that not only work but are also maintainable, well-documented, and easy for others to use/adopt.

You have a strong sense of pride in your work and a passion for following engineering best practices. You are also a critical and flexible thinker, able to recognize when a standard approach may not be the ideal fit for our unique environment. You can apply the underlying principles of these best practices and adapt them to create effective solutions that work for us.

You are an excellent listener, who seeks to understand beyond what was simply said. You enjoy working with people just as much as you enjoy solving technical puzzles.

We plan and work using the Scrum framework, so we'd like you to have experience with Scrum or another Agile framework.

As a disruptive company wanting to make 'Britain Green', a passion for sustainability and environmental issues is a bonus.

About Us
What's in it for you...
Healthcare plan, life assurance and generous pension contribution

Volunteering Day

Hybrid Working

Various company discounts (including shops, gyms, days out and events)

Holiday of 25 days (plus bank holidays) & ability to buy/sell days

Cycle to work scheme, car pooling and onsite parking available

As a valued member of the team, you will be supporting the Group Environmental Policy and its associated sustainability objectives and targets.

Flexibility statement
The fast moving nature of the company's business means that from time to time you may be asked to perform duties or tasks outside of your original job description on an ad hoc basis. This allows the company to use its people in the best possible way at all times and helps the employees to make their contribution in a changing environment.

Ecotricity is Britain's greenest energy company. When we started back in 1995, we were the first company in the world to provide a new kind of electricity - the green kind.

Our mission was, and remains, to change the way energy is made and used in Britain - by replacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy.

We don't just supply green energy, we use the money from our customers' bills to make it ourselves too - we build windmills, sun parks and green gasmills in Britain. We call this turning 'bills into mills'. Some of our biggest achievements to date include building Britain's first megawatt windmill and the country's first grid-scale sun park, as well as building our first green gasmill, generating 100% green gas from a source that we will never run out of grass.

We don't just focus on energy though- we built the Electric Highway, Britain's leading network of electric vehicle charging points; we helped Forest Green Rovers become the greenest football club in the world; and we launched Britain's greenest mobile phone service, Ecotalk, where they use the money from their customers' bills to protect and regenerate Britain's lost rainforests.

Ecotricity is an equal opportunities employer and is committed to providing equality for all.