Lead Platform Engineer

Location

• Remote, but requirement to meet up once a month for in-person collaboration day
• UK based

Job Summary

Akixi is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to take both technical and people leadership of our platform engineering function. Reporting to the Head of Cloud Operations, you will bring deep expertise across Azure and AWS cloud infrastructure, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and configuration management (Ansible), underpinned by a strong grounding in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles.

Beyond hands-on engineering, you will lead and mentor an experienced team of 4 engineers, set technical direction, and act as a trusted advisor to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT). A central part of this role is leading a strategic initiative to migrate away from our incumbent SIEM provider and to design, build and operate our logging and security-monitoring capability in-house.

You will play a pivotal role in automating infrastructure, improving reliability and scalability, and ensuring smooth CI/CD pipelines across multiple environments, working closely with software engineering and security teams to drive platform excellence. This is a hybrid role, with some on-call required around platform upgrades.

Leadership & Team Responsibilities

• Technical & people leadership: lead, mentor and line-manage a team of experienced platform, DevOps and SRE engineers, several of whom bring 15 to 20 years of senior experience.
• Mentoring: coach and develop team members, support career growth, and create an environment of ownership, reliability and continuous improvement.
• Delivery: own resourcing, prioritisation and delivery across the platform roadmap.
• Reporting: provide regular, clear reporting to the SLT on infrastructure performance, risk, KPIs and delivery progress, and influence decision-making at a senior level.

Key Responsibilities

• SIEM migration & in-house logging: lead the migration away from our incumbent third-party SIEM vendor, managing a controlled offboarding and exit, and design, build and operate an in-house SIEM and centralised logging capability.
• Logging & detection: own log collection, aggregation, retention and alerting, with detection use cases and dashboards aligned to security, incident-response, compliance and data-retention needs.
• Design, build and manage scalable, secure and resilient infrastructure on Azure and/or AWS using Terraform (modularised, reusable components).
• Implement configuration management solutions using Ansible, including playbook development, inventory structuring and role-based automation.
• Manage secrets securely using services such as Azure Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault.
• Implement robust monitoring, alerting and observability tooling (e.g., Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis and resilience improvements.
• Maintain and evolve CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines or Jenkins.
• Automate deployments for container-based workloads on AKS, ECS (Fargate), or Azure Functions/Lambda, and manage supporting infrastructure.
• Collaborate with development teams to optimise build/deploy cycles and reduce lead time for changes.
• Ensure security best practices are embedded into infrastructure provisioning and pipeline execution.
• Support compliance and auditing by implementing guardrails and controls as code (e.g., Azure Policy, AWS Config, SCPs, IAM/Entra ID policy management).
• Some out-of-hours (OOH) work is required to maintain production systems, including participation in the OOH critical ticket rota.

Required Skills & Experience

• Depth of experience: significant experience in DevOps, SRE or Cloud Engineering roles (typically 10+ years), including a proven track record at senior or lead level. You will be comfortable setting direction for a highly experienced team.
• Vendor exit & in-house build: demonstrable experience offboarding or migrating away from a vendor or managed service, and building logging, observability or SIEM technologies in-house.
• SIEM/logging tooling: hands-on experience with one or more logging/SIEM stacks (e.g., Elastic/ELK, OpenSearch, Grafana Loki, Splunk, Wazuh or similar).
• Expertise in Azure: VMSS, Entra ID (Azure AD), Azure Networking (VNet, NSGs), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, Azure Monitor/Log Analytics, Azure DevOps, Azure Storage, Azure SQL/Cosmos DB, ARM/Bicep templates.
• Expertise in AWS core services: EC2, IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda.
• Strong proficiency in Terraform (HCL), including workspaces, modules, and Terraform Cloud or similar, across multi-cloud (Azure and AWS) environments.
• Ansible experience: developing roles, dynamic inventories and managing remote configurations.
• Strong scripting knowledge (Bash, Python or Go).
• Experience with container orchestration and deployment (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS or AKS).
• Proficient with GitOps or IaC-based workflows.
• Familiarity with Google SRE practices, particularly around reliability, observability and operational excellence.
• Understanding of systems reliability metrics and associated tooling.

Soft Skills & Behaviours

• Self-driven, with a bias toward action and ownership.
• Excellent communicator, able to collaborate across disciplines and levels of technical understanding.
• Proven experience leading or managing a technical team, with the ability to influence decision-making at Senior Leadership level.
• Experience working as part of a cross-functional team.
• Comfortable working in agile environments (Scrum/Kanban).