Staff Platform Engineer

The brief

Joining a 4-engineer platform team owning K8s, CI/CD, observability, and developer experience for the rest of R&D. Staff-level IC role — no direct reports, but expected to set the technical direction for the team.

Scope of the role

• · Sets the platform team's 12-month technical roadmap with the VP Engineering.
• · Hands-on owner of two of: K8s control-plane, CI/CD platform, observability stack, internal developer platform (Backstage).
• · Mentors the four other platform engineers without line-managing them.

Must-haves

• · Eight-plus years in production platform engineering, two of those at staff or principal level at a Series-B+ company.
• · Production K8s ownership at multi-cluster scale.
• · Has rolled out a CI/CD or observability migration across an engineering org of 50+.
• · UK right to work; the role is hybrid London (3 days a week in office).

Nice-to-haves

• · Backstage or comparable IDP rollout experience.
• · Go or Rust at production scale.
• · Open-source contribution history in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Process

1. 45-min initial call with Daniel.
2. Two-hour technical conversation with the VP Engineering.
3. Take-home design exercise (8 hours, 5-day window).
4. On-site loop: 4 × 60-min interviews + lunch with the team.
5. Offer.

Consultant on the search