Principal Engineer
$110,000–$140,000 year
RemoteUnited Kingdom
Job Summary
Design scalable, reliable cloud-based infrastructure and platform services using Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitOps while managing production clusters at scale. Partner with Product and Engineering Directors to scope large initiatives, set architectural vision, and establish company-wide standards for operational excellence and incident response. Lead on-call rotation to drive reliability improvements, mentor Engineers up to Staff level, and collaborate with non-technical stakeholders to solve complex problems. Own the platform tech radar, advocate for FinOps practices, and ensure end-to-end service ownership across the organization.
Required Qualifications
- hands-on technical leader with deep Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Cloud expertise
- proven track record of designing and delivering scalable, reliable cloud-based infrastructure and platform services
- extensive experience running and supporting services in production environments, including on-call leadership and incident command at scale
- previous experience as an individual contributor in an Engineering leadership position (Staff+, Principal, Architect, etc.)
- Deep expertise managing Kubernetes production clusters at scale — cluster lifecycle and upgrades, resource optimization (autoscaling, quotas), security (RBAC, Network Policies), high availability and troubleshooting complex networking or scheduling issues
- Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), particularly Terraform, and modern GitOps practices
- Strong software engineering foundations with the ability to build and maintain production-grade tooling
- A strong understanding of observability, SLOs, alerting and cost management for large-scale systems
- Operational experience with our key infrastructure components: Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Istio
- People leadership in the form of mentorship and coaching
- Ability to collaborate with non-technical colleagues to convert ambiguously defined problems into well-understood requirements and pragmatic solutions
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with Go
- NodeJS
- Familiarity with LLMOps
- helping shape how we operate LLM-powered systems at scale (model gateways and routing with LiteLLM, experiment and model tracking with MLflow)
- A FinOps mindset; you drive cost-awareness as an engineering discipline across teams, balancing spend against reliability and performance, and turn infrastructure cost into a metric teams own rather than a surprise on the bill
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