Principal Platform Engineer

Location Wales
Business Unit Services, Workplace Professional Services
Reporting to Stuart Wallace
Package Basic salary plus non-sales incentive
Clearance BPSS and NPPV3 vetting required
Working pattern Hybrid, with optional home working on Mondays and Fridays

Take technical ownership of the platforms that support Centerprise services and customer operations. You will lead improvements in reliability, observability and automation while remaining closely involved in complex engineering, major incidents and service recovery.

Role Summary

As Principal Platform Engineer, you will own the day-to-day reliability, operability and continual improvement of the Centerprise platform estate.

This is a senior, hands-on position combining technical leadership with the coordination of a small engineering team. You will establish standards, reduce operational effort and ensure platform services remain stable, recoverable and efficient to support.

What you'll do Platform reliability and operations

• Own the operational health, availability and reliability of the platform estate.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for platform issues and incidents.
• Lead the investigation and resolution of complex infrastructure and platform problems.
• Support major incidents, continuity events and service recovery, including out-of-hours escalation when required.
• Identify and address technical debt, operational risk and platform weaknesses.
• Ensure services remain supportable, recoverable and operationally efficient.

Observability and service health

• Own monitoring and observability tooling, standards and operational dashboards.
• Develop service health metrics that provide clear and useful operational insight.
• Improve the quality of monitoring and alerting so teams can respond quickly and effectively.
• Use operational data to identify reliability improvements and automation opportunities.
• Develop a more proactive approach to service health and platform management.

Engineering leadership and standards

• Provide senior technical ownership across the platform estate.
• Coordinate the daily workload, priorities and activities of Platform Engineers.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, operating procedures and platform documentation.
• Provide technical guidance that strengthens capability across the team.
• Ensure internal and customer platform onboarding is completed consistently.
• Remain hands-on in the design, operation and improvement of platform services.

Automation and continual improvement

• Make automation a standard engineering practice within the platform function.
• Identify repetitive operational activities and reduce manual effort.
• Design and implement platform automations using appropriate scripting, orchestration and workflow tools.
• Work closely with Delivery Engineering and Automation Engineering to improve repeatability and efficiency.
• Ensure each improvement leaves the service easier to operate, maintain and support.

Platform and service development

• Contribute technical expertise to the development of the Centerprise platform services.
• Support the introduction of new platform capabilities and technologies.
• Provide input into operational readiness, service design and technical standards.
• Support upgrades, migrations, optimisation and lifecycle activity.
• Assist with customer requirements involving local repositories, backup services, and onward transfer to cloud platforms.
• Provide limited presales support when specialist platform knowledge is required.

Security and governance

• Follow Centerprise information security policies and promptly report weaknesses or incidents.
• Maintain high standards of security, resilience and operational control.
• Support a strong health and safety culture across the business.

What success looks like

• Platform reliability and availability show measurable improvement.
• Repeat incidents and manual operational effort are reduced.
• Monitoring and alerting provide clearer insight and support faster intervention.
• Platform onboarding and service transition follow consistent, repeatable standards.
• Major incidents and recovery events are handled with control, pace and sound technical judgement.
• Platform documentation, engineering practices and team capability continue to develop.

What you'll bring Core experience

• Proven experience in a senior infrastructure, platform or reliability engineering role.
• Experience operating and supporting business-critical platforms.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills across infrastructure and platform services.
• Experience coordinating technical priorities and workloads within a small engineering team.
• Experience supporting major incidents, service recovery and resilience testing.
• A relevant degree or equivalent practical experience operating infrastructure and platform services.

Technical capability

• Strong hands-on experience with VMware, Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication.
• Experience with monitoring, observability and dashboarding tools, including Grafana or an equivalent platform.
• A strong understanding of backup, recovery and resilience technologies.
• Experience in improving operations and reducing manual effort through automation.
• The ability to use scripting, orchestration and workflow automation tools where appropriate.
• Confidence in diagnosing complex issues across interconnected platform services.

Behaviours and approach

• You build trust and can influence colleagues outside your immediate team.
• You communicate technical information clearly, concisely and appropriately.
• You remain calm under pressure and are prepared to challenge constructively.
• You gather the right information before making timely, well-reasoned decisions.
• You adapt quickly when priorities change without losing focus on service quality.
• You take ownership of outcomes and maintain a strong customer focus.
• Experience with Zerto, OpsRamp, Cohesity or Microsoft 365 backup solutions.
• Experience with n8n or similar workflow automation platforms.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code concepts and tooling.
• Experience working in an ITIL-aligned operational environment.
• Experience within an MSP or managed services organisation.
• Experience contributing to platform or service development.
• Experience supporting customer onboarding and service transition.
• Relevant VMware, Veeam, Microsoft, infrastructure, backup, monitoring or automation certifications.

Centerprise is a well-established UK technology provider with over 40 years of experience delivering infrastructure, cloud, managed services and lifecycle solutions.

We combine the strength of a national organisation with the agility of a growing business, supporting public and private sector customers across the UK.

• Take senior technical ownership of a platform estate supporting critical services.
• Influence engineering standards, automation priorities and the future development of platform services.
• Work closely with experienced teams across Technical Operations, Delivery Engineering, Service Excellence and Automation Engineering.
• Build broader experience within a privately owned technology group offering varied career paths and continued investment in its people.

Financial and lifestyle

• Company pension with the option to join the salary sacrifice or salary exchange pension scheme.
• Electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme.
• Death in service cover at four times the basic salary.
• SAGE Employee Benefits membership.
• Salary sacrifice charity donation scheme.
• Ci Christmas Savings Club and Ci Lottery.
• Free parking at out-of-town offices.

Health and wellbeing

• Two additional days for personal wellbeing.
• Access to partially subsidised private medical insurance.

Work-life balance

• 25 days' annual leave, rising to 28 days after more than five years' service.
• Hybrid working, with optional home working on Mondays and Fridays.

Our culture

Centerprise values customer focus, commitment, courage, innovation and dedication. We encourage people to take ownership, support colleagues and challenge established ways of working when a better outcome is possible. The Centerprise Group is an equal opportunity employer.