Lead Platform Engineer

OpenCredo (OC) is a UK based software development consultancy helping clients achieve more by leveraging modern technology and delivery approaches. We are a bunch of passionate technologists who thrive tackling complex challenges, delivering pragmatic and sustainable solutions for our clients. Curious, tenacious but always sensitive to our clients' context, we are not afraid to speak our minds to help steer our clients towards understanding and achieving their key goals. 

We are looking for a lead platform engineering consultant to help us grow on our journey of taking OC to the next level. Your experience as a cloud and platform engineering focused technologist and leader will involve helping companies of various shapes and sizes design, architect and implement scalable, reliable cloud native solutions.

What you’ll spend your time on:

• Cloud Native Architecture & Design and Hands On Delivery: Design, Build and Develop modern, scalable cloud platforms which deliver value and provide end-to-end solutions. This may involve building a scalable multi-region Kubernetes cluster, or a secure and highly transactional data streaming pipeline. You may also land up coding new Terraform providers in Golang or creating automated repeatable builds, pipelines and environments.
• Leadership & Consulting: Provide technical leadership and guidance for our clients and your fellow colleagues in the area of cloud and platform engineering. Advise and guide on best practices and pragmatic solutions for building and delivering cloud native solutions within broader IT, software and organisational contexts. Guide, teach and provide space for OCers to learn their craft, and advance their careers. 
• Pre Sales Activities: Assist with creating and providing input into proposals, as well as technically liaising and representing OC in pre-sales calls.
• Public Speaking (optional). Develop and deliver talks at international conferences, meetups and within the broader community (Help provided)

In return, we’ll give you…

• A highly competitive basic salary
• 5% matched contributory pension
• Private Health Insurance
• Life Insurance
• 25 days’ holiday plus public holidays (plus an extra day for each year of service)
• Cycle to work scheme
• A high spec laptop (of course!)

Need more reasons? Here's a few more...

• Work with some of the most exciting new technologies
• Spark off co-workers who’ll challenge your thinking and help you to achieve your potential
• Deal openly and honestly with customers
• Benefit from a transparent environment including regular company meetings where we discuss anything and everything
• Have exceptional opportunities as a speaker, blogger and contributor to open source projects. We have some great connections in the wider technology community that we encourage our team to make the most of!
• Work alongside senior leaders who understand and value passionate technologists;
• Enjoy coming to work! We’re a friendly, sociable bunch who genuinely support each other and have a lot of fun

What we’re looking for: 

• Client facing Cloud & Platform expert: You will be comfortable advising and guiding clients, confident in your ability to deliver as a Cloud and Platform Engineering Expert. Expertise working with core solutions and offerings of Azure. (Preferably with certifications to match)
• Distributed Systems Experience: You have played a primary role in architecting and developing complex distributed architectures. You understand and can reason about core distributed computing principles and theory, and can recognise patterns and approaches taken by different technologies and tools in this space. You are all too aware of the fallacies of distributed computing and how this can negatively impact a solution if not taken into account. 
• Platform Engineering Skills: You know your DevOps from your GitOps.  You understand the principles underlying the creation of a platform for sustainable, repeatable, resilient continuous delivery.
• Pragmatic & Versatile Architecture Skills: You’re someone who is equally happy coding, whiteboarding and articulating approaches & solutions with clients, or leading a team. You understand core cloud principles and what they can offer, yet always seek to blend and balance real world considerations with pure theoretical ones when architecting solutions. You will look to bring DevOps, Infrastructure-As-Code (IAC), automation and a 12-factor mindset to the table.
• A Problem Solver with a Can Do Attitude: You can be relied on as the person who gets stuck in and makes things happen. You are adept at facilitating, asking probing and challenging questions and being able to uncover the true root of problems / issues which arise.  
• Innovation & Continuous Learning: You enjoy and actively seek to learn about new technologies and techniques in tech space. You are an advocate for promoting and incorporating best practices around automation, testing and building resilience into the broader delivery process.

Experience with as many of these as possible:

• Container Orchestration: Experience with Kubernetes and Service Meshes (such as Istio) including extending K8S by building operators in Golang
• Infrastructure-As-Code: Automation focused technologies such as Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible etc
• Observability: Log management, monitoring, alerting and Distributed Tracing tools such as ELK, Prometheus, Jaeger​, Zipkin​ 
• Security: Secrets management solutions such as HashiCorp Vault, Zero Trust models
• Microservices & Serverless: Large scale microservice and/or serverless solutions, which have run across multiple delivery teams and streams 
• Modern Data Platforms utilising technologies such as: Apache Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, RDBMS, Cloud specific data offerings (eg SageMaker etc).