Lead Platform Engineer - Leeds - Lhasa Limited

Description

Overview

The Lead Platform Engineer provides strategic technical leadership for Lhasa's cloud-native platform engineering initiatives, establishing architectural standards and operational practices that enable scalable SaaS product delivery. They drive the evolution of developer experience through self-service platforms, GitOps workflows, and comprehensive observability solutions.

Leading a team of platform engineers, they mentor technical talent whilst collaborating with stakeholders across the organisation to align platform capabilities with business objectives. The Lead Platform Engineer owns service production reliability, implements DORA and Core 4 metrics for continuous improvement, and ensures compliance with security standards in high-value data environments. They balance strategic cloud platform planning with hands-on technical execution to deliver world-class engineering platforms.

Why Lhasa Limited?

We are a successful not-for-profit company and educational charity, with a great reputation for collaborative scientific development.

We develop meaningful science and software that supports the delivery of life-enhancing solutions including the development of safe chemicals to market including drugs and cosmetics as well as making a positive contribution to reducing animal testing.

Our charitable status enables us to make altruistic decisions for the public benefit and to work with some of the leading organisations in the world to really make a difference.

Our salaries are competitive dependent upon skills and experience. We also offer fantastic personal benefits including (but not limited to); 34 days holiday plus bank holidays, a generous pension scheme, healthcare cashback, PMI, free car parking at our office in Leeds City Centre and much more

Main Responsibilities

include but are not limited to:

Leadership

• Strategic leadership of the platform engineering team, developing talent at all levels.
• Lead the team's vision, strategy and roadmap for platform engineering initiatives, ensuring they are aligned with broader organisational goals.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the platform engineering team and across tech teams
• Manage team capacity planning and resource allocation, balancing feature delivery with operational excellence and technical debt reduction
• Collaborate with stakeholders to drive organisational change management for platform adoption.

Technical Leadership & Cloud Platform Strategy

• Lead implementation of DORA and Core 4 metrics whilst establishing operating models for SaaS product delivery
• Coach and mentor engineers on Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and GitOps good practices whilst reviewing infrastructure changes
• Design GitOps workflows using ArgoCD and architect self-service capabilities through Backstage portal
• Plan cloud platform (internally and AWS), managing cost optimisation and infrastructure budgets
• Establish platform standards for cloud, containerisation, orchestration, observability, security, and CI/CD practices

Developer Experience & Service Management

• Enhance Backstage portal with personalised dashboards and Software Templates for common patterns
• Own production SaaS infrastructure reliability, providing third-line support for escalations
• Design robust CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins whilst managing multi-cluster Kubernetes environments
• Implement security good practices (RBAC, network policies) and disaster recovery strategies
• Partner with Product Teams and Member Services to understand customer requirements and address platform needs

Observability & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki) with comprehensive SLIs/SLOs and alerting
• Create runbooks and incident response procedures
• Drive cost optimisation strategies for internal cloud and AWS infrastructure
• Eliminate toil through automation and optimise deployment pipelines for reliability improvements
• Research new technologies and evolve platform based on industry good practices
• Partner with security teams on compliance in high-value data environments
• Facilitate platform engineering community of practice and coordinate with product teams on planning
• Document architectural decisions and ensure consistent tool adoption across teams
• Mentor and coach engineers on platform technologies and best practices
• Review code and infrastructure changes from team members

Skills and Knowledge

• 5+ years designing cloud infrastructure with proven track record of owning production SaaS platforms
• Expert Kubernetes orchestration including multi-cluster management and resource optimisation
• Experience architecting cloud infrastructure across multiple providers with cost management ownership
• Hands-on GitOps experience with ArgoCD and Helm for continuous deployment
• Proficiency in IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, Ansible) and observability platforms
• Knowledge of security standards and compliance in high-value data environments
• Strong stakeholder management with ability to influence across organisational boundaries
• Experience with developer portal platforms for self-service capabilities
• AWS or Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD)
• DORA/Core 4 metrics implementation
• Experience evolving platforms based on industry good practices
• TypeScript/React for portal customisation