Sanderson
PRINCIPAL PLATFORM ENGINEER
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Role: Principal Platform Engineer
Location: London, United Kingdom (Hybrid – Minimum 1 Day Per Week in Office)
Employment Type: Full-time
Salary: £97,480 – £121,850 + 20% Flexible Benefits Package
Are you an experienced Principal Engineer with a passion for building and operating large-scale distributed systems and database platforms? We're looking for a hands-on technical leader to help shape the future of our platform engineering capability. This is an opportunity to lead complex engineering initiatives, define technical strategy, and act as a subject matter expert across AWS infrastructure, distributed databases, Terraform and cloud-native platform services. You'll work closely with architects, engineers and senior stakeholders to design resilient, scalable and secure platform solutions while mentoring engineers and driving engineering best practices across the organisation.
What You'll Do
- Lead the design and engineering of secure, scalable and highly available cloud platforms
- Build and manage AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
- Design, deploy and operate distributed systems and persistence platforms
- Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams
- Define engineering standards, platform roadmaps and best practices
- Drive automation, resilience, observability and operational excellence initiatives
- Support and mentor engineers through code reviews, coaching and technical leadership
- Collaborate with architects and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions
- Deliver highly resilient, secure and performant infrastructure solutions
- Act as the technical authority for distributed database and persistence technologies
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Required Experience
- 8+ years' experience in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps, SRE or Software Engineering
- Expert-level AWS infrastructure experience
- Strong Infrastructure as Code expertise with Terraform
- Strong Linux systems administration and networking knowledge
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
- Hands-on experience deploying and managing distributed database platforms
- Deep understanding of SQL vs NoSQL databases, ACID principles and CAP theorem
- Experience building highly available and fault-tolerant architectures
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, automation and DevOps practices
- Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership
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Key Technologies
- AWS
- Terraform
- Linux
- Cassandra
- Couchbase
- ScyllaDB
- Kafka
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Observability & Monitoring Platforms
- Distributed Database Technologies
Nice to Have
- Experience with additional distributed persistence technologies
- Background in large-scale cloud-native environments
- Experience defining enterprise platform strategy and architecture roadmaps
- Strong understanding of messaging and event streaming architectures
- Experience leading technical initiatives in complex matrix organisations
This role is ideal for someone who has personally built, deployed and operated distributed database platforms—not simply consumed managed services—and is looking to take ownership of technical direction while remaining hands-on with engineering delivery. If you're a Principal Engineer who thrives on solving complex platform and infrastructure challenges, we'd love to hear from you.
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