Principal Platform Engineer

The Role

The Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer has deep expertise in building and operating digital and data products, particularly within complex client environments and multi-team projects. This role plays a key part in delivering high-quality outcomes through strategic influence, hands-on support, and deep domain knowledge. You will collaborate closely with Principal Product and Delivery roles, as well as Technical and Delivery Leads, to ensure that technology choices align with both client goals and Red Badger’s value propositions. You will engage with the wider team and stakeholders to consult and influence on topics such as technology adoption, continuous delivery, team structure, deployment strategy, and organisational policy. Your ability to guide clients through emerging technologies and industry best practice will help create the conditions for teams to succeed with autonomy and impact.

As a Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer, you elevate those around you by supercharging delivery teams, mentoring others, and embedding technical excellence at every level. You bring thought leadership, pragmatism, and curiosity to solving complex problems, and are trusted to represent Red Badger in high-level client conversations with confidence and clarity.

Hands-on work is expected to be the majority of the role - demonstrating by doing, but also be prepared to get involved in thought leadership, sharing your knowledge with other badgers, and high value consulting activities.

Key responsibilities

Discipline expertise

Supporting lean approach to software delivery and overall solution design and focus on delivering maximum value with minimal effort

Providing architectural framework and solution design

Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology where appropriate

Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code

Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice

Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset

Upskilling Red Badger software engineers in new technologies and approaches

Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger

Collaborative leadership

Feed into account level technology leadership / governance

Contributing to the overall success of the Red Badger client engagement

Potentially leading multiple technology teams across a programme of work

Aligning Badger / client teams on appropriate processes & tooling

Influencing our clients

Consulting on areas of technology expertise

Operating as trusted advisor consulting on client technology strategy, technology roadmap Coaching senior client technology stakeholders

It’d be great if you have

Experience with the following tools and technologies:

Terraform

FLUX

Kyverno

Istio

Github Actions

Prometheus/OTEL

Extensive experience with cloud platforms - especially AWS., and understanding of progressive ways of managing infrastructure, such as infrastructure-as-code,

Extensive experience with container/image management and orchestration tools such as Docker, K8s/EKS

Experience with setting up modern CI/CD pipelines to support continuous delivery and deployment and good understanding of the trade-offs (e.g. pipelines-as-code, monorepos, GitOps, branching and release strategies, etc.)

An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions (e.g. PCI, GDPR…)

Experience in design and testing strategies to enable gradual evolution of systems over time

Good understanding of data storage approaches and tools and trade-offs involved (RBDMSs, key-value stores, column stores, log storage, …)

Good understanding of applying cryptography in software development (e.g. TLS, PKI, HMAC, hashing algorithms, etc.)

Experience in a consulting environment with client engagements

Ability to influence senior client stakeholders and support teams with technology and process enablers to support continuous delivery and DevOps ways of working

Experience with establishing good engineering practice focused on lean, cross-discipline, continuous delivery

It’d be amazing if you can also

An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions

Experience with running live services with significant volume of users and establishing appropriate SLOs and error budgets for services and applications

Experience designing observability strategies for systems with multiple components

What we offer

We make sure our team is well looked after with generous salaries and a great benefits package which includes:

Annual £2,000 training budget

Enhanced pension with employer contribution of up to 5% of your salary

Group Life Insurance

Income Replacement Benefit

Critical Illness Cover

Private Medical Insurance

Your choice of hardware and mobile phone

£1,000 home-office set up budget and contribution to home broadband

Matched (pre-tax) charity GAYE donations

Cycle to work

Enhanced parental leave

Red Badger Values:

People people

We respect and care for each other, giving us the space to be our true selves.

Find a way

We’re comfortable with uncertainty, and want to take ownership for outcomes, which we are proactive in delivering.

Always learning

We’re curious. It’s how we learn and grow as individuals, continuously testing and improving what we do, and how we do it.

Open & Fair

We build trust by telling things as they are, being open, and seeking to achieve fair and equitable outcomes.

Collaborative

We are united by our desire to get to the best ideas. We are generous with our knowledge, actively listen to each other, and are open minded.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and it is our fundamental belief that the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue to do amazing work for our clients.