Senior Platform Engineer

The Platform domain is the foundation everything else runs on - an AWS-native SaaS platform processing millions of parcels every day. As a Senior Platform Engineer, you don’t just keep the lights on: you design how the infrastructure and tooling that thousands of European e-commerce businesses depend on actually works. You own real pieces of the platform end to end, help shape how the team builds things, and when something breaks at 2am, you’re one of the people who can be trusted to fix it properly, not just patch it. The Platform domain is structured around two focused teams: Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure - EKS (Kubernetes), VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, Terraform modules, and operational reliability. The engine room everything runs on. Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer - CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Argo CD), progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts), observability tooling (Datadog APM and scorecards), DORA metrics, developer self-service, and the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely. The Role As a Senior Platform Engineer, you are a senior individual contributor within the Platform domain, sitting in either Foundation Platform or Developer Platform. You combine deep hands-on engineering with the judgement to make sound architectural calls inside your area of ownership, and you’re a natural point of reference for the engineers around you. This is a step up from a Platform Engineer role: more ownership, more autonomy, and a genuine voice in how we design and operate the platform. It’s also a deliberate stepping stone - for engineers who want to grow into Staff Engineer scope, this is where you build the track record of independently-owned, well-executed initiatives that makes that case. What you’ll do Technical Ownership & Execution

• Independently design, build, and operate platform services and infrastructure components within your area - from a well-scoped problem through to production
• Make sound architectural decisions for medium-complexity, well-bounded problems, escalating and documenting (via ADRs) when trade-offs reach beyond your immediate scope
• Apply Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and AWS best practices to keep services reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware
• Take the lead on at least one substantial roadmap item per planning cycle, planning and estimating it without requiring detailed external specification

• Proactively find and fix what’s broken - flaky pipelines, undocumented runbooks, unowned resources - without waiting to be asked Delivery & Collaboration

• Plan and deliver platform work within the team’s 6-week planning cycles, splitting larger initiatives into shippable increments
• Coordinate with the other Platform team, Product Engineering, and stakeholders when your work has cross-team dependencies
• Participate in the on-call rota, respond to incidents with urgency, and write clear, blameless post-mortems for incidents within your area
• Contribute to Peak Season preparation and other organisation-wide operational programmes

• Take part in the Engineering Hiring Interviewer Pool, helping assess platform engineering candidates Mentoring & Growth

• Mentor Platform Engineers and onboarding colleagues through pairing, code review, and technical guidance
• Lead by example on code quality, testing, and documentation, and help raise the bar for the engineers around you

• Share knowledge proactively - runbooks, design notes, and walkthroughs that reduce tribal knowledge and make the platform easier to operate for everyone Engineering Culture

• Give direct, constructive feedback in design discussions and code reviews, and be equally open to receiving it
• Bring a “platform as a product” mindset: think about the internal teams who consume your services as real customers

• Surface risks and technical debt early to your Engineering Manager and peers, rather than letting them become incidents What you bring to the table Personally

• You take ownership - you don’t wait to be told what’s broken, you find it and fix it, or flag it clearly
• You communicate well: you can write an honest post-mortem, explain a trade-off in a design review, and disagree respectfully
• You are comfortable with ambiguity, but you know when a problem needs to be escalated rather than solved alone
• You see documentation as part of the job, not an afterthought

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including at least 2 years focused on platform, infrastructure, or SRE work
• Solid AWS experience across core services: EKS (Kubernetes), VPC/networking, IAM, RDS, S3, and at least one of CloudFront/WAF/Lambda
• Production experience with Kubernetes and Helm, including troubleshooting workloads and understanding RBAC and cluster operations
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform, including writing and maintaining reusable modules
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and understanding the principles of progressive delivery (canary, blue-green)
• Working knowledge of observability practices - metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLO/SLI thinking (Datadog or equivalent)
• A security-conscious mindset: IAM hygiene, secrets management, and awareness of compliance basics (SOC2, GDPR)

• Strong written and verbal English - you can explain a technical trade-off clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders Professionally - Strong Advantage

• Experience operating a platform in a SaaS scale-up context - you understand the gap between a startup’s infrastructure and a platform with real enterprise-grade commitments
• Exposure to event-driven architecture (NATS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) in a multi-tenant environment
• FinOps awareness - cost-per-service thinking, rightsizing, and the ability to spot wasteful infrastructure
• Prior mentoring experience, whether formal or informal

From €80000 gross annually, inclusive of 8% holiday pay (based on your specific skillset and professional background) This is what you tell people at parties, No bullshit : Big egos suck. Be open, honest, and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don’t just talk about problems - solve them. Grow & Win : Be highly curious, adaptable, and proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours. Have fun : Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you’re the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze - enjoy the ride. Benefits Brain Benefits €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team Time Benefits 28 days paid vacation/year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones Sabbatical Benefits