About this role
We are looking for a Lead Platform Engineer (Inside IR35) for a 6-month contract. Hybrid working with occasional travel to London.
PLEASE NOTE: SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be willing & eligible to undergo checks. Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position (short-term nature of this role and speed at which we require a postholder in situ) preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance.
The Lead Platform Engineer role will operate as a technical leader for platform capability, working closely with Principal Developers, delivery teams, DevOps colleagues, security specialists, and service teams. You will help shape, build, and manage self-service platforms that enable teams to deliver high-quality digital services safely, consistently, and at pace.
You will have proven experience leading platform, DevOps, infrastructure, or software engineering work in a complex environment. You are confident operating to agile and product-centred principles and will thrive on collaborating with technical colleagues to turn common engineering needs into reusable platform capabilities, standards, and patterns.
You will take technical decisions in line with the overarching strategic direction and ensure platform standards are applied consistently. You will remain close to emerging technologies and modern engineering practices, identifying, testing, and championing adoption where they improve developer experience, security, reliability, sustainability, or value for money.
Alongside delivery, the role will support broader technology modernisation and cross-cutting engineering improvement. This may include developing self-service routes to approved tooling and infrastructure, improving CI/CD and release practices, strengthening observability and operational readiness, reducing duplication, improving automated testing and quality gates, and creating paved paths that help teams deliver secure and maintainable services with confidence.
As a Lead Platform Engineer your main responsibilities will be:
- Acting as a technical leader for platform engineering, taking localised decisions in line with our overarching strategic direction and orchestrating platform work across teams and services.
- Understanding the needs of developers, service teams, and end users, and using those needs to shape self-service platform capabilities, reusable patterns, and support models.
- Maintaining a strong focus on benefits, outcomes, value for money, and sustainable adoption when prioritising platform improvements and technology modernisation activity.
- Ensuring teams have the skills, guidance, documentation, and support needed to use platform services effectively, including coaching, pairing, mentoring, and recommending learning or training areas.
- Overseeing knowledge transfer between Principal Developers, platform, development, DevOps, security, and operational teams, ensuring platform decisions align with departmental standards, security expectations, and service management needs.
- Leading improvements to platform ways of working, including platform management, governance, lifecycle planning, observability, automation, technical debt reduction, and the introduction of changes at a sustainable pace.
Essential:
- Significant hands-on experience designing, operating and improving Microsoft Azure platform services in a complex environment, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerisation, observability, automated testing and secure cloud infrastructure.
- Strong software-engineering and coding experience with C#.NET, RESTful APIs and Git, including building web or CLI applications and creating secure, maintainable reusable libraries, components or automation.
- Proven technical leadership of platform, DevOps, infrastructure or software-engineering work, including designing reusable self-service capabilities and influencing, coaching and coordinating colleagues across multiple technical teams without relying on formal line-management authority.
In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".