Platform Engineer

Department: Technology

Location:Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office)

Reports to: Head of Engineering

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary:(Depending on experience) 

Role Overview 

This is a new role, and a pioneering one. We are investing in platform engineering as a discipline. You won’t just be keeping the lights on, but actively improving how our engineers work: faster feedback loops, better tooling, smoother development workflows, and a foundation that scales with the business.

As the Platform Engineer at Cambridge Spark, you will work closely with our existing infrastructure engineer and directly with the Head of Engineering to shape this capability from the ground up. It is a hands-on technical role; you will be writing code and building things, not just advising on them. 

Key responsibilities:

• Own and evolve our GCP-based platform alongside the existing infrastructure engineer, increasing resilience and reducing single points of failure
• Establish developer experience as a discipline — audit where engineering time is lost, and systematically improve it through better tooling, automation, and process
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, local development environments, and internal tooling that make the engineering team faster and more confident
• Introduce infrastructure-as-code and platform engineering best practices where they are missing or immature
• Collaborate across engineering, product, and curriculum teams to understand where platform limitations are creating friction
• Contribute to our AI tooling adoption — we are an AI company and expect our engineering practice to reflect that
• Work with the Head of Engineering to set technical direction for the platform, with genuine influence over decisions
• Secure Infrastructure - We have a lot of data that needs to be secured according to standards
• Monitor Infra - Monitor infrastructure performance and errors and make fixes independently

Candidate Specification: 
Technical skillset:
Essential

• Solid, hands-on cloud platform experience (we use GCP) 
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) 
• A track record of meaningfully improving CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with the developer experience space: local dev tooling, observability, internal platforms, and similar
• Comfortable across the platform stack rather than deeply specialised in a single area; we are not at a scale that rewards narrow expertise
• Exposure to Kubernetes clusters
• Solid Linux experience
• Comfortable with CLI and debugging servers via SSH
• Comfortable with scripting (e.g. bash)

• Experience with Python-based software and environments
• Experience with data-heavy engineering environments 
• Working with Kubernetes custom resource definitions and creating operators
• Comfortable with Automation tools such as Ansible

Ways of Working:

• Generalist instinct: you reach for the right tool rather than your favourite one, and you are comfortable operating across a broad remit
• Pioneer mindset: you have seen good platform and DX culture somewhere, whether that’s in a large best-in-class org, or a smaller company where you’ve built it from scratch. You want to build it somewhere new — you do not need a playbook handed to you
• Self-starter: if you see a problem, you just fix it if it’s small. If the fix is large or high-risk, you communicate what the problem is, and why it needs careful design.
• Resilient: you thrive when building something new, where tactical priorities change but we have a consistent end goal.
• Collaborative but confident: you build trust with peers through competence and consistency, and you hold your ground when you need to
• Pragmatic about AI: We support AI-assisted development. We care more about outcomes than which tools you use, so we give you the models to use (or not) as you see fit.
• Communicative: you surface problems early, document your thinking, and keep stakeholders appropriately informed without being prompted

What This Role Is Not

• It is not a people management role — you will not have direct reports
• It is not a specialist infrastructure role — if pure SRE or cloud ops is what you want, this is probably not the right fit
• It is not a big-company environment — we are a bootstrapped edtech business; you will need to be comfortable with resource constraints and wearing multiple hats

Why This Role

• Genuine greenfield opportunity to establish platform engineering and developer experience as disciplines at a company that is serious about AI
• Direct access to and influence with senior leadership
• A stable, values-driven business with a social impact mission in education and skills
• The autonomy to do the role properly, not just execute a predetermined roadmap

Company Benefits: 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.  Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.