Principal Platform Engineer

The Role The Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer has deep expertise in building and operating digital and data products, particularly within complex client environments and multi-team projects. This role plays a key part in delivering high-quality outcomes through strategic influence, hands-on support, and deep domain knowledge. You will collaborate closely with Principal Product and Delivery roles, as well as Technical and Delivery Leads, to ensure that technology choices align with both client goals and Red Badger’s value propositions. You will engage with the wider team and stakeholders to consult and influence on topics such as technology adoption, continuous delivery, team structure, deployment strategy, and organisational policy. Your ability to guide clients through emerging technologies and industry best practice will help create the conditions for teams to succeed with autonomy and impact. As a Principal DevOps / Platform Engineer, you elevate those around you by supercharging delivery teams, mentoring others, and embedding technical excellence at every level. You bring thought leadership, pragmatism, and curiosity to solving complex problems, and are trusted to represent Red Badger in high-level client conversations with confidence and clarity. Hands-on work is expected to be the majority of the role - demonstrating by doing, but also be prepared to get involved in thought leadership, sharing your knowledge with other badgers, and high value consulting activities. Key responsibilities Discipline expertise • Supporting lean approach to software delivery and overall solution design and focus on delivering maximum value with minimal effort • Providing architectural framework and solution design • Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology where appropriate • Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code • Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice • Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset • Upskilling Red Badger software engineers in new technologies and approaches • Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger Collaborative leadership • Feed into account level technology leadership / governance • Contributing to the overall success of the Red Badger client engagement • Potentially leading multiple technology teams across a programme of work • Aligning Badger / client teams on appropriate processes & tooling Influencing our clients • Consulting on areas of technology expertise • Operating as trusted advisor consulting on client technology strategy, technology roadmap Coaching senior client technology stakeholders It’d be great if you have • Experience with the following tools and technologies: • Terraform • FLUX • Kyverno • Istio • Github Actions • Prometheus/OTEL • Extensive experience with cloud platforms - especially AWS., and understanding of progressive ways of managing infrastructure, such as infrastructure-as-code, • Extensive experience with container/image management and orchestration tools such as Docker, K8s/EKS • Experience with setting up modern CI/CD pipelines to support continuous delivery and deployment and good understanding of the trade-offs (e.g. pipelines-as-code, monorepos, GitOps, branching and release strategies, etc.) • An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions (e.g. PCI, GDPR…) • Experience in design and testing strategies to enable gradual evolution of systems over time • Good understanding of data storage approaches and tools and trade-offs involved (RBDMSs, key-value stores, column stores, log storage, …) • Good understanding of applying cryptography in software development (e.g. TLS, P