Platform Software Engineer

i2 Group, aHarris Computer company, is seeking a Platform Software Engineer on a full-time, permanent, remote basis with a monthly requirement of attending the i2 Group offices in Cambridge.

The Role
The Platform team solves one of the harder problems in software delivery: getting the same product to work correctly on a developer's laptop, a cloud cluster, a multi-node on-premise deployment, and a fully air-gapped system. None of those environments are ones we control once deployed, and loose intent produces different results on each of them. The job is deciding precisely what has to be true everywhere, and then building it.
Alongside customer-facing delivery, the team builds the internal platform capabilities that let our R&D teams self-serve infrastructure and software. It is our second priority and the area where our AI-first workflows have moved fastest.
We are a small team, working closely with Architects, UX Designers, and Product Managers. We are looking for engineers who can define, design, and build platform capabilities, rather than simply maintain them.

How We Work

We are AI-first. The bottleneck has shifted from writing to thinking, the AI writes the code, you own the decisions that shape it. If you have worked this way before, you'll recognise the workflow immediately. If you haven't, it's a shift in how you think about your time. Your focus is on the decisions, not the code that expresses them.Deep expertise in a specific tool stack matters less than it once did. What counts is knowing what good looks like — enough domain awareness to write a meaningful spec, ask the right questions, and develop an instinct for where AI helps, where it misleads, and when not to trust it.

Whether you come from an AI-first background or a platform engineering background, you are welcome here. The AI-first developer brings rigour and reasoning; the platform engineer brings domain knowledge and an instinct for what good looks like. Either way, we'll help you get there.

What You'll Be Doing

The precision described above is not a separate activity from delivery — it is how we deliver. In practice the role covers:

• Designing, building, and maintaining the software and tooling used to deploy, configure, and operate i2's products across desktop, single-box, on-premise, and cloud targets

• Building production-grade container images and the interfaces they expose to hosting platforms

• Owning the deployment and upgrade story for stateful distributed components, including recovery paths from shapes already shipped to customers

• Delivering releases to customers across diverse and often restricted environments, and supporting the upgrade paths from what is already in the field

• Developing internal platform capabilities that let R&D teams self-serve infrastructure and software

• Maintaining and improving CI/CD pipelines and internal developer tooling

• Instrumenting deployments and the delivery pipeline so that decisions are made on data

• Contributing to architectural decisions, validating that what gets built matches what was specified, and owning the quality of AI-generated output

• Owning the testing strategy for deployments

What We're Looking For

The things we care most about are the ones that are hardest to teach: a spec-first way of working, design thinking, and the judgement to know when something that looks right is not.

Specifically:

• You can take a vague requirement, interrogate it, record the decision and its trade-offs, and define the test that would prove it wrong

• You can decompose a system into components with clear responsibilities, decide where a boundary belongs, and be concrete about what crosses it and how it is authenticated

• You are AI-first or ready to commit to it — not just willing to try it alongside your existing workflow

• Cloud deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code — you have built deployments on a major cloud and understand the tooling

• You have the judgement to recognise when AI output is wrong — a plausible implementation that quietly violates a security invariant, or a port that looks correct and is not

• You are comfortable working in technologies and deployment topologies you have not encountered before, and you learn them quickly

The technical depth we look for sits alongside those traits, not above them. We want experience in platform or software engineering in a commercial environment — enough exposure to deployment and operational concerns to write meaningful specs and validate AI output against them:

• Experience shipping software to structurally different deployment targets; you understand why they differ, not just that they do

• Container technology: you have built and shipped production-grade images, not just run them locally

• Cloud deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code: you have worked with AWS and understand the tooling

• Application security: you understand trust boundaries, identity models, and secrets handling

• CI/CD pipelines: you have built and maintained them, not just consumed them

• You can work effectively with engineers, architects, and non-technical stakeholders

• The role may require UK national Security Check (SC) vetting;

  candidates must be eligible for and willing to undergo this if needed.

• Bachelor's degree in software engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent experience

What You'll Work With

These are the technologies you will be working with day to day:

• AI coding tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) as the primary development workflow
• AWS today, with Azure and Google Cloud planned
• Infrastructure as code: AWS CDK and CloudFormation
• CI/CD with CircleCI and internal developer tooling
• Docker and production image pipelines
• Deployment tooling for Windows and Linux, including desktop installer and packaging
• Apache Solr, ZooKeeper, DB2, SQL Server, Postgres
• Ansible for configuration management
• Python

Helpful, But Not Required

• Kubernetes

• AWS or Azure certification in one or more disciplines

• FastAPI, React, or TypeScript, for internal developer tooling and portals

Benefits

• Salary: £45,0000 - £65,000

• 25 days holiday + 5 Personal Days leave + bank holidays

• Private health and dentalcare

• Employee share options

• Annual Lifestyle Reward amounting £325 per annum/pro rata.

Supporting Your Application

Our recruitment process comprises interviews and, at times, a written exercise, an assessment day, and/or a presentation. As an equal opportunities employer, we want to do all we can to make this a positive experience for you. If your application progresses, please make us aware of any adjustments or additional support we can provide.