Lead Platform Engineer

Job Type: Permanent

Location : Hybrid: based at any of our UK offices Birmingham, London, Telford, Edinburgh with time spent working in the office and at home

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 15th October

Salary and benefits: from £75,000 (dependant upon experience) plus an indicative bonus range of 16–32%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

Who are we?

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

The role

This senior, hands-on role will shape and operate the orchestration and developer platform solutions supporting our Pensions & Savings technology services. You will lead delivery across developer tooling, automation and reusable workflows—including GitHub, GitHub Copilot, developer portals, artefact and container management, observability and cloud integration—while partnering across application, architecture, security, risk and technology teams to provide secure, governed and scalable developer experiences.

What you will do

- Build, operate and continuously improve secure, reliable and reusable internal developer platform capabilities for Pensions & Savings.
- Create and evolve golden paths and automated onboarding journeys that help engineering teams onboard new and existing workloads, adopt approved developer tooling and deliver software consistently.
- Administer and improve GitHub and GitHub Copilot capabilities, including organisation, team and repository onboarding, access, policies, rulesets and reusable workflows.
- Develop robust platform automation using appropriate combinations of GitHub Actions, APIs, infrastructure as code and scripting, replacing manual or inconsistent processes wherever practical.
- Support secure artefact and container management, including integration with build and delivery workflows and appropriate controls for access, provenance, retention and vulnerability management.
- Contribute to developer portal and self-service capabilities that improve discoverability, documentation, service ownership and access to standard platform journeys.
- Embed security, identity, governance, compliance and observability into platform services and onboarding processes, while maintaining the operational health and auditability of enterprise developer tooling.
- Partner with application, product, architecture, security, risk and operations teams to resolve complex issues, support effective use of tools such as Jira and Confluence across the software development lifecycle, and improve platform capabilities through documentation, enablement and feedback.

What are we looking for?

- Strong hands-on experience in platform engineering, DevOps or developer tooling, with a track record of creating reliable automation, reusable workflows and self-service capabilities.
- Practical experience with GitHub and modern software delivery practices, including repositories, access controls, CI/CD and secure development workflows.
- A security-first approach to operating enterprise tooling, with a sound understanding of identity and access management, privileged administration, secrets, platform policies and auditability.
- Familiarity with internal developer platforms, developer portals and golden-path approaches, together with a practical understanding of cloud environments and related capabilities such as artefact and container management, observability, AI-enabled developer tooling, Jira and Confluence.
- The ability to take ownership of complex technical work, make and explain sound engineering decisions, and collaborate effectively with application, architecture, security, risk and operations teams.

How will we measure success?

- Secure, reliable and supportable internal developer platform services that meet agreed operational, security and compliance expectations.
- Faster, safer and more repeatable workload onboarding through effective golden paths, reusable workflows and automated controls.
- Growing adoption of approved developer tooling and self-service capabilities, with reduced developer friction and less reliance on manual intervention.
- Improved operational outcomes through effective observability, automation, clear service ownership and the reduction of recurring platform and onboarding issues.
- Transparent and responsible consumption of developer tooling and platform services, with decisions balancing developer value, performance, risk and cost.
- Stronger platform engineering capability through sound technical leadership, clear documentation, effective enablement and knowledge sharing.

We want to hire the whole version of you.

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.

We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out. #LI-GJ1

Find out more about working at Standard Life

Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates

Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us