Xceptor is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to build and evolve the internal platform that enables teams to ship production-grade software quickly, consistently, and safely. This is an AI-first platform role focused on creating paved roads for delivery, including templates, CI/CD foundations, environment provisioning, security guardrails, and self-service workflows.
What You'll Do
- Build and maintain 'golden paths' for engineers: repo templates, service scaffolds, standard CI pipelines, and common delivery patterns.
- Make the right thing the easy thing: reduce setup time, lower cognitive load, and improve the end-to-end developer workflow.
- Define and maintain platform standards that enable speed without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Partner with tribes to understand friction points and continuously improve developer experience based on evidence.
- Build internal platform services and tooling that provide self-service capabilities (provisioning, configuration, secrets, environments, diagnostics).
- Enable consistent cloud and on-prem delivery paths with clear abstraction and documented operational constraints.
- Improve environment parity and 'works the same everywhere' behaviors through standardization and automation.
- Provide reliable internal APIs, tools, and documentation that teams can depend on.
- Build and evolve CI/CD foundations: pipeline templates, build/test gates, artifact versioning, release orchestration, and safe rollout/rollback practices.
- Automate repetitive delivery tasks (scaffolding, configuration generation, validation checks, release notes) to reduce toil.
- Ensure platform tooling integrates naturally with engineering workflows and encourages small PRs and frequent releases.
- Collaborate with SRE to embed reliability and operational readiness into delivery pipelines.
- Embed security and compliance guardrails into the platform: dependency scanning, policy-as-code, secure defaults, and least-privilege patterns.
- Ensure platform workflows support auditability and traceability suitable for regulated customers.
- Partner with Security and Engineering to balance control with speed, ensuring guardrails are automated and low-friction.
- Provide standard observability defaults in templates and pipelines: structured logging, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerting hooks.
- Improve the quality and consistency of operational signals available to teams, reducing 'unknown unknowns' in production.
- Partner with SRE and QA so developer workflows and production signals align.
- Use AI routinely to accelerate platform delivery: drafting scaffolds, pipelines, IaC, policies, docs, and diagnostics, with rigorous verification.
- Establish 'agents draft, humans verify' as the normal way of working for platform artefacts, with clear standards and review expectations.
- Build team-level leverage through 'golden prompts', templates, and automated checks that make fast delivery repeatable for all tribes.
- Continuously improve platform capabilities using feedback loops: adoption data, developer friction signals, incident learnings, and time-to-ship metrics.
- Work closely with engineering teams and leadership to identify where the platform can remove friction and improve delivery speed.
- Coach teams in using the platform effectively, and incorporate feedback to improve usability and adoption.
- Collaborate across Platform Engineering, SRE, QA, and Security to align standards and avoid conflicting guidance.
- Contribute to a culture of high standards, high tempo, and pragmatic innovation.
What We're Looking For
- Significant experience as a Platform Engineer / DevOps Engineer / Infrastructure Engineer / Software Engineer in a platform capacity (typically 5+ years).
- Strong experience building internal platform tooling and/or operating shared delivery systems in modern engineering organisations.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, release engineering, and automation principles (pipeline templates, gates, artifact management, rollout/rollback).
- Familiarity with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration tooling.
- Experience with GitOps principals of deployment.
- Experience with scripting and coding languages (e.g. bash, powershell, python, Go, C#, Java).
- Experience with developer portals (e.g. Port, Backstage).
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code and environment automation (e.g. terraform, github actions, azure devops).
- Strong cloud and cloud-native fundamentals (Azure preferred) and understanding of operational constraints across environments (including on-prem where applicable).
- Comfortable designing developer-focused APIs/tools with usability, reliability, and maintainability in mind.
- Strong troubleshooting and systems thinking across build, deploy, runtime, and developer workflows.
- Uses AI routinely to accelerate platform outcomes (scaffolds, pipelines, IaC, docs, diagnostics) and validates outputs before adoption.
- Able to build repeatable workflows that improve delivery speed and quality for entire teams, not just personal productivity.
- Understands AI risks (unsafe automation, false confidence, security/privacy) and applies disciplined verification and controls.
- Strong stakeholder and relationship management skills; can influence across teams without authority.
- Pragmatic, outcome-driven problem solver with a bias for automation and evidence-based improvement.
- Clear communicator; able to translate developer needs into platform capabilities and adoption.
- Customer- and control-aware mindset suited to regulated, mission-critical environments.
- Experience building CI/CD foundations, automation tooling, and developer experience improvements in production environments.
- Experience with cloud services and IaC; Azure experience beneficial.
- Strong academic background, including a degree in a STEM subject discipline, or equivalent experience.
Technical Stack
- Kubernetes
- Bash
- Powershell
- Python
- Go
- C#
- Java
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- Azure DevOps
- Azure
Team & Environment
You will work across Platform Engineering, SRE, QA, Security, and engineering tribes.
Xceptor is an equal opportunity employer.
