Platform Engineer

A day in the life

As a Platform Engineer, you will join our platform squad. We build and maintain the AWS infrastructure, deployment pipelines, tooling and engineering standards that every other squad at ManyPets depends on.

This role has a security focus. Much of your first year will be spent building the tooling that lets us demonstrate our security controls are working: automated compliance checks, reporting, and evidence collection to support our ISO 27001 commitments. Alongside that you will help us tighten access controls across our cloud estate, and take on ownership of the edge and network security tooling that protects our services.

You will also work closely with our Head of Security as we build out a dedicated security capability at ManyPets.

Our environment is fast-paced and highly collaborative. You will work closely with your teammates using pair or mob programming, participating in regular workshops and planning sessions, primarily over Zoom, with occasional in-person collaboration.

We embrace modern development practices:

• All our services are cloud-hosted on AWS, using serverless and event-driven architectures for scalability and resilience.
• We use a fully automated deployment pipeline, allowing you to release to production within minutes, multiple times per day.
• We define our infrastructure as code, and we emphasise observability, testing and secure-by-design principles from the start.

As a squad we own our work end-to-end, including development, maintenance and support. You will play a key role in ensuring the reliability and quality of what we provide to the rest of engineering, and contribute to a culture of rapid learning and continuous improvement.

Your responsibilities

ü  Build and maintain secure platform foundations

• Design, build and maintain the shared cloud infrastructure, tooling and deployment pipelines that other squads rely on.
• Define infrastructure as code so our environments are consistent, repeatable and reviewable.
• Make secure configuration the default, so squads get it without having to ask for it.
• Maintain the edge and network security tooling that protects our services.
• Share in the day-to-day operational ownership of the platform, responding to requests and issues raised by other squads.

ü  Make our security controls provable

• Build automated checks that continuously test our cloud estate against our security and compliance requirements.
• Automate the collection and reporting of evidence for ISO 27001, replacing manual effort.
• Surface and report on gaps, drift and findings so they can be prioritised and resolved.
• Work with our Head of Security to turn written policy into controls that are enforced by tooling.

ü  Strengthen access and identity controls

• Review and tighten access across our cloud accounts, working towards least privilege.
• Improve how we manage secrets, credentials and machine identities.
• Make access changes auditable, and straightforward for engineers to request and for us to review.

ü  Extend our platform standards beyond AWS

• Help us apply the standards, tooling and controls we have built in AWS to our Google Cloud estate.
• Work with the teams who use Google Cloud to understand their needs and where the gaps are.

ü  Team collaboration

• Work closely with other squad members and stakeholders to align on goals and solutions.
• Support engineers across other squads who use our platform, and take their feedback seriously.
• Proactively build shared understanding across the team through pairing, discussions, and reviews.
• Document your work clearly to support knowledge sharing and future maintenance.

ü  Self development

• Take ownership of your learning journey and technical development plan.
• Approach challenges with curiosity and a growth mindset.
• Learn from your peers and actively seek feedback and mentorship.

Your skills and experience

We are looking for someone with:

• Commercial experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure on a major cloud provider (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure).
• Hands-on experience defining infrastructure as code, using CDK, Terraform or similar.
• Experience building and maintaining continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
• A good working understanding of cloud security fundamentals, including identity and access management, secrets management, network controls and encryption.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language, ideally Python.
• Comfort working in a regulated environment. We are FCA regulated and take our ISO 27001 commitments seriously.

We would also like to see at least one of the following. You do not need both, and we will support you to build the other:

• A security specialism, such as cloud security posture management, security tooling, threat modelling or compliance automation.
• Experience across more than one cloud provider, ideally both AWS and Google Cloud.

The interview process

This position has a four-stage interview process, which will be held via Zoom.

• Stage 1 - an initial conversation with a member of our Talent team.
• Stage 2 - an informal meeting with the hiring manager for about 45 minutes. We will explain more about the role and explore how your experience matches up with what we need.
• Stage 3 - a longer interview, up to an hour, with the hiring manager and two engineers from the team. We will ask some competency questions and work through a technical scenario together. There is no take-home exercise.
• Stage 4 - an informal conversation with our Head of Security.

About the team

The EPD ("Engineering, Product and Design") team operates with a squad system and Agile ways of working within quarterly terms - and we really enjoy working collaboratively. We hold regular ‘Hack Weeks’ to look at products and address problems relating to the business, and we get the chance to highlight and work on things we’re interested in and feel passionately about.

Our tech stack

We are on a mission to become the best we can be, constantly challenging ourselves to achieve and learn.  You will be supported to learn new technology – both in breadth and depth - and encouraged to challenge our ways of thinking with new and innovative ideas.

Our “north star” is to become an elite performer as defined by the 4 key DORA metrics.  To drive towards elite status, we apply and continually inspect and adapt the best Agile frameworks and practices inspired by DevOps, SRE, Scrum, XP and Lean.  We are a highly collaborative environment and regularly practice Mob and Pair based programming which we believe improve our quality of delivery and share understanding.

We take our operational performance, security, and reliability as seriously as our quality and development practices.  We are cloud hosted and highly automated, primarily on AWS with some critical services running on Google Cloud.

Some specific technologies we use include: AWS | Google Cloud | Python | CDK | GitHub Actions | MongoDB | Aikido | Cloudflare