Principal Platform Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Bristol, UK

Principal Platform Engineer

We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.

We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 200 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe's fastest-growing engineering businesses.

About the role

We're seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to define and lead the engineering platform that underpins how Rowden develops, deploys, and operates technology. The platform will improve developer experience and make Rowden's engineering faster, more consistent, more scalable, and more secure. This is a high-impact opportunity to build the engineering foundations of one of the UK's most exciting technology companies.

Working closely with Software, Infrastructure, ML, IT, Product, QA, and Security teams, you'll lead the delivery of the platform vision, define its architecture, and raise the standard of engineering practice across the organisation. You'll ensure the platform scales with Rowden's ambitions and meets the demands of its engineering teams. This is a hands-on role; you will lead by building.

This role offers hybrid working with a minimum of 3 days per week on-site at our Bristol HQ.

For senior roles, compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. Because that can vary significantly, we do not always publish a fixed salary band. We will, however, discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time.

Candidates must be eligible for SC Clearance.

More information about security clearance is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels

Key areas of responsibility

Working closely with the Head of Platform Engineering, you'll define and deliver robust platform services, establish the patterns for self-service infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability, and drive the integration of AI/ML capabilities across the organisation. You'll translate platform strategy into a coherent technical roadmap, setting standards that teams across Rowden can build on with confidence.

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you will be responsible for:

• Defining the technical architecture and long-term direction of Rowden’s internal developer platform (IDP).
• Leading the design and evolution of IDP capabilities, including self-service provisioning and deployment workflows.
• Defining the platform's approach to agentic AI, establishing the patterns, guardrails, and runtime infrastructure required to deploy and operate AI agents reliably across the organisation.
• Setting standards for API-first architectures that enable interoperability between systems, services, and external partners.
• Owning the design and governance of CI/CD pipelines to support consistent, secure, and efficient software delivery across the organisation.
• Driving the adoption of modular platform capabilities that allow teams to compose and extend functionality at scale.
• Owning infrastructure-as-code standards and automation practices to ensure repeatability, scalability, and reliability.
• Embedding security, compliance, and best practices into the platform by design, and ensuring these are sustained as the platform evolves.
• Defining and maintaining platform standards, patterns, and reusable components that drive consistency across teams.
• Leading improvements to observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities across systems and services.
• Mentoring and developing engineers across the organisation, raising the collective standard of platform engineering practice.
• Identifying and driving strategic opportunities to improve developer experience, reducing friction and cognitive load at an organisational level.

We are looking for a technically deep, strategically capable engineer who brings both hands-on expertise and the ability to shape how an organisation builds and operates its platforms.
Skills you'll need:

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating engineering platforms at scale.
• Deep understanding of platform engineering principles, including infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, system design, service integration, and platform product thinking.
• Experience designing platforms that support agentic AI workloads, including the infrastructure and integration patterns required for autonomous task execution, tool use, and model orchestration at scale.
• Proven experience defining API strategies and building integration layers between complex systems.
• Extensive experience with using systems like Kubernetes, Terraform, and FluxCD in production scenarios.
• Strong understanding of modular platform design, composable architectures, and long-term platform scalability.
• Expertise in observability tooling - logging, metrics, and tracing
• Deep knowledge of secure-by-design and zero-trust principles, with experience applying these at an architectural level.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (e.g. Python, Go, or similar) to design and deliver platform tooling and automation.
• Deep empathy for engineering experience and a strong desire to improve it.
• Experience providing technical leadership across cross-functional teams, influencing direction and building alignment around shared outcomes.

• Mission-Focused: You care about enabling others to do their best work and delivering meaningful outcomes.
• Relentless: You take ownership and see problems through to resolution.
• Collaborative: You work effectively across teams, building trust and shared understanding.
• Quality-Driven: You take pride in building robust, scalable, and maintainable systems.
• Pragmatic: You focus on solutions that work in practice, not just in theory.
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously learn, improve, and embrace new approaches where they add value, particularly in fast-moving areas like AI and platform integration.

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!

We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.

Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.

Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!