Principal Platform Engineer

Join Europe's leading, high-growth Google Cloud consultancy. At Qodea, you’ll be part of a team energised by innovation and passionate about delivering exceptional results. We craft cutting-edge solutions in data and analytics, AI, cloud infrastructure and security, driving digital transformation that empowers our customers to scale, modernise and lead in their industries. We’re driven by ideas and powered by our people.

We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to engage with enterprise-level organisations to offer a consultative view and direction on best practices using Google Cloud solutions.

How You’ll Shape Our Success

The main purpose of this role is to lead cloud technology initiatives by applying deep technical expertise and business insight to help shape internal engineering standards.

What You’ll Do:

• Act as a trusted advisor to customers, developing a deep understanding of their technical challenges and leveraging GCP technologies, patterns and practices to address them effectively.
• Provide expert technical guidance and mentorship to platform engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement
• Design highly available, cloud native platforms tailored to customer needs
• Advise customers on modern software development and architecture techniques such as 12 factor applications, microservices and serverless architectures
• Develop internal tooling for the wider Platform Team, that can help us to do more, and be more effective
• Collaborate with customers and our Pre-sales Team to translate requirements into technical designs and guide the process through to solution delivery
• Partner with our Pre-sales Team to support the development of Go-To-Market strategies that align with customer needs and business goals
• Keep abreast of technology developments, ensuring the Qodea business remains ahead of the technology curve.
• Represent Qodea in external engagements with Google and the wider tech community. We can align this to your strengths, for example technical writing or presenting at events.
• Get involved in our drive towards social progress where possible. Whether that’s getting involved in one of our community projects at Qodea or simply buying local when travelling with the company.

Requirements

What You’ll Need to Succeed

Essential Skills and Experience:

• Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Strong experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments, with a deep understanding of container orchestration and management.
• Proficient in infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, and comfortable with configuration management tooling such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or Salt.
• Expert-level understanding of Linux operating systems (e.g., Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS) with experience in some systems administration and troubleshooting
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, such as Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar pipelines, with a focus on automation and reliability
• Solid knowledge of modern internet protocols and patterns, including but not limited to GRPC, GraphQL, REST APIs, and related tools.
• Proven experience in a cloud focussed delivery role (DevOps or Software Development)
• You’re proactive and you like to solve problems. You want to get involved and make things happen, ensuring the best outcomes for your team, the business and our customers
• Previous experience in a consultancy or professional services role
• Solid knowledge of cloud architecture principles and highly available systems
• Understanding of application development, delivery and infrastructure automation
• Comfortable writing production-quality software in at least one general-purpose programming language (e.g. Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, C++)

Nice to have Skills and Experience:

• Experience working in multi-cloud or with hybrid-cloud architectures
• Familiarity with cloud security frameworks (e.g. HashiCorp Vault, IAM best practices, container security tools)

How You’ll Grow:

Exceptional performance in this role can lead to advancement opportunities within our career framework or internal opportunities with other business areas, aligned with your career aspirations and business needs.

Benefits

Financial:

• Competitive base salary.
• Discretionary company bonus scheme.
• Employee referral scheme
• Meal Vouchers

Health & Wellbeing:

• Health Care Package
• Life and Health Insurance
• Bookster

Time Off & Flexibility:

• 28 days of annual leave
• Floating bank holidays
• An extra paid day off on your birthday.
• Ten paid learning days per year.
• Flexible working hours
• Sabbatical leave (after 5 years).
• Work from anywhere (up to 3 weeks per year).

Development & Recognition:

• Industry-recognised training & certifications.
• Bonusly: employee recognition and rewards platform.
• Clear opportunities for career development.
• Length of Service Awards.

Extra Perks:

• Regular company events.

At Qodea, we champion diversity and inclusion. We believe that a career in IT should be open to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability or neurotype. We value the unique talents and perspectives that each individual brings to our team, and we strive to create a fair and accessible hiring process for all. If you feel we can improve in any way, please reach out to our careers team via email at careers@qodea.com or connect with us on LinkedIn via our Qodea Company Page.