Senior Platform Engineer - Developer Experience

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform. We connect private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Our online platform helps sellers achieve great prices for their cars while giving dealers fast, reliable access to the stock they want for their dealerships. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding.

This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better.

About the job

Are you someone with a passion for DevOps and are looking to help build and be part of a new Developer Experience team within the Motorway Product & Engineering org? Motorway continues to grow, and we want to provide our developers with the best experience, which is where you come in.

We have recently built and rolled out a new container platform on top of AWS Fargate, and are currently enhancing our observability, reliability, and developer-focused tooling. We will continue to build and evolve secure, standardised platform capabilities that reduce cognitive load and help teams ship faster with confidence.

This is an exciting time to join, the team is new and the company growing which presents opportunities to do things “right” to set up success for the org into the future.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve our AWS environments and shared platform infrastructure, focusing on reliability, scalability, and ease of use for product teams.

• Design and build opinionated, self-service tooling that makes it easy for engineers to build, deploy, and operate services correctly.

• Continuously reduce manual work (toil) by automating common workflows and standardising infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and platform abstractions.

• Define and implement platform-level monitoring and alerting standards that provide meaningful signals without overwhelming teams.

• Enable product teams to use shared metrics and signals to understand and improve the reliability of their services across environments.

• Own and evolve our continuous delivery and release capabilities, reducing time to production while maintaining high standards of reliability and safety.

• Stay current with best practices in application hosting, continuous delivery, and developer experience, and apply them pragmatically to the platform.

• Upskill and mentor other engineers in the team.

As a senior engineer, you are expected to bring prior experience operating and evolving production platforms at scale. You’ll use your judgement to make trade-offs, anticipate failure modes, and help the team avoid repeating past mistakes. Learning is encouraged and supported, but you should be comfortable operating independently after onboarding and sharing lessons from real-world experience.

Requirements

• Proven track record of owning and operating web platforms in production at scale.

• Strong experience with AWS in a production environment.

• Experience defining meaningful metrics, monitoring, and alerting for web platforms, with a strong intuition for actionable vs noisy signals.

• Experience working with platform-level security controls and observability, including identifying and responding to abnormal or unsafe system behaviour.

• Experience designing and operating continuous delivery systems that support safe, repeatable, zero-downtime deployments.

• Experience responding to production incidents in an on-call environment and improving systems based on what you learn.

• Comfortable with command-line tools and environments.

• Proficient with at least one programming language used for automation or tooling.

• Enjoy solving complex, cross-cutting problems in collaboration with engineers across the organisation

• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment with evolving requirements and priorities.

• Enjoy mentoring and sharing knowledge within the team and the wider engineering organisation.

This role includes a shared, out-of-hours on-call rotation after an initial onboarding period. On-call is supported by the wider engineering team and is designed to be sustainable and continuously improved

Benefits

• A competitive salary

• BUPA health insurance

• Discounted gym membership through BUPA

• OnHand volunteering membership and one paid volunteering day per year

• Hybrid working

• Pension scheme

• Motorway car leasing scheme - lease a zero-emissions electric vehicle at a significant discount

• Enhanced parental leave - We offer enhanced maternity pay (26 weeks of full pay) and enhanced paternity pay (4 weeks of full pay) to eligible employees.

• Workplace nursery scheme

• Regular social events

• Cycle to work scheme

Equal opportunities statement

We are committed to equality of opportunity for all employees. We work to provide a supportive and inclusive environment where people can maximise their full potential. We believe our workforce should reflect a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives and experiences. Our strong commitment to a culture of inclusion is evident through our constant focus on recruiting, developing and advancing individuals based on their skills and talents.

We welcome applications from all individuals regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.