Principal Platform Engineer (AWS) £120,000 – £140,000 benefits
Remote-first (UK) with occasional client-site travel

We’re hiring for a brand-new Principal Platform Engineer role for one of our long standing clients and looking for a cool person who wants to shape, not just deliver, cloud platforms at scale.

The company design and build some of the most secure AWS environments in the UK, supporting national security, defence, and highly regulated public sector organisations.

This is a 60% hands-on / 40% hands-off role, ideal for a senior engineer who still loves being close to the tech, but also thrives on architecture ownership, stakeholder influence, and team leadership.

You’ll play a pivotal role in defining AWS platform strategy, leading delivery across complex programmes, and acting as a trusted technical voice for both clients and internal teams. If you’ve worked with AWS Landing Zones at scale, this is where you’ll do your best work. (but that’s not essential)

What you’ll be doing

• Own and evolve AWS platform architecture across complex, multi-account, highly secure environments
• Design, implement and optimise AWS Landing Zones,
• Act as a technical leader and escalation point across multiple projects and client engagements
• Balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership, design authority and stakeholder management
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation and AWS CDK
• Embed security-by-design, integrating services such as IAM, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub and Inspector
• Design CI/CD pipelines enabling self-service, repeatable and auditable deployments
• Partner closely with AWS, internal delivery teams, and senior client stakeholders
• Mentor and lead engineers, raising the bar for engineering quality, documentation and best practice

Skills: Essential

• Significant hands-on experience designing and running AWS platforms at scale
• Strong background in secure cloud architecture for regulated environments
• Proven experience balancing technical delivery with leadership and stakeholder management
• Infrastructure as Code expertise (Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK)
• Strong understanding of AWS networking, IAM, encryption and security patterns
• Eligibility for SC clearance

Nice to have

• AWS Landing Zone accelerator or framework experience
• Kubernetes / EKS and container platforms
• Observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
• Python, Go or similar for automation
• Experience working directly with AWS on architecture or delivery

The nitty and gritty:

• £120,000 – £140,000 salary depending on experience
• Remote-first working, with meaningful but limited client travel
• Opportunity to shape a new role with real autonomy and influence
• Work on nationally critical, genuinely interesting projects
• Collaborate with senior engineers, AWS specialists and industry leaders
• 25 days holiday bank holidays
• Up to 5% employer pension contribution