The Platform Engineering Lead leads Flooid's Platform Engineering team with a clear mission: simplify how software is built, assured and published - reducing friction, cutting cycle times and making software delivery faster and more cost-effective across the organisation.
This role combines hands-on technical leadership with people management.
You own the end-to-end CI pipeline - from code commit through build, test assurance and bill of materials generation, culminating in artifact publication to our artifact repositories (Nexus and Google Artifact Registry). Responsibility ends at that handover boundary; a separate team owns continuous deployment.
You will work closely with the VP of Engineering and principal engineers to identify and dismantle unnecessary complexity, using a pragmatic, incremental approach.
This is not a pure management role - you are expected to be hands-on and comfortable doing the technical work yourself. But we expect that hands-on contribution to be delivered agentically: using AI-assisted tools such as Cursor to move faster and more effectively, rather than spending your days heads-down in a traditional IDE. You are a technically confident leader who can do the detail, drive engineering transformation, bring people along through change, and make hard calls when needed.
Responsibilities
Team Leadership
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Lead and manage a team of approximately five engineers: three CI/DevOps engineers (direct reports) and two TestOps engineers (indirect).
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Set clear goals, hold regular 1:1s and actively develop your team's capability and career growth.
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Identify where team members are adding complexity rather than reducing it, and coach them toward simpler, faster approaches.
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Build a culture of continuous improvement, openness to change and accountability. Where individuals are unwilling or unable to adapt, manage performance decisively.
CI Platform & Transformation
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Own the CI pipeline: build, static analysis, test execution, bill of materials generation and artifact publication to Nexus/Google Artifact Registry.
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Partner with the VP of R&D and principal engineers to define and execute a simplification roadmap - reducing cycle times from days to something operationally credible.
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Apply an incremental strangulation approach where appropriate: replacing legacy complexity gradually rather than through big-bang rewrites.
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Establish pipeline-as-code standards in Jenkins (Groovy) and enforce consistency across engineering teams.
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Optimise Java build tooling (Maven), Node/JavaScript build processes, caching strategies, incremental builds and test execution to improve build speed and reliability.
- Define and maintain quality gates: code coverage thresholds, static analysis, vulnerability scanning and artifact signing.
Developer Experience
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Treat the CI platform as a product - your customers are the software engineers.
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Reduce the cognitive overhead of building, testing and publishing software.
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Work closely with engineering teams to understand their pain points and prioritise platform improvements accordingly.
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Embed agentic AI development practices — including tools such as Cursor — as part of how platform engineering work is done, both by you and progressively across the team.
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Explore and, where appropriate, pioneer the use of orchestrated Cursor skills executed within a VM as pipeline components — moving beyond traditional scripted rules engines toward agentic, skill-based pipeline execution.
CD Awareness & Handover
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Maintain sufficient working knowledge of the CD landscape — Terraform, Ansible, Helm, ArgoCD and Google Artifact Registry — to ensure a clean, well-documented handover from CI to the CD team at the artifact boundary.
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No ownership of CD, but the interface between CI and CD must be well-defined and reliable.
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Build and maintain a strong collaborative relationship with the Cloud Engineering team who own CD — treating the handover not as a boundary to defend, but as a shared commitment to enabling smooth, high-quality delivery end to end.
Stakeholder & Cross-Team Engagement
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Represent Platform Engineering across engineering forums, sharing progress, risks and opportunities.
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Define and deliver the platform engineering roadmap in collaboration with wider engineering leadership.
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Champion shift-left security practices in partnership with SRE and security stakeholders.
Requirements
A successful candidate is a technically confident, pragmatic leader who combines engineering depth with the judgment and interpersonal skills to drive meaningful change.
You are comfortable challenging the status quo, influencing without always having direct authority, and holding people to high standards.
Essential
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Proven experience in a Platform Engineering, DevOps or CI engineering role within a cloud-based environment.
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Deep hands-on experience with Jenkins, including Groovy-based pipeline scripting; broader CI tooling experience (e.g. GitHub Actions or similar) also welcome.
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Strong Java build and delivery ecosystem knowledge - Maven, dependency management and multi-module builds; familiarity with Node/JavaScript build tooling also relevant.
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Hands-on experience with artifact management tooling - Nexus, Google Artifact Registry or equivalent.
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Experience leading or managing a small engineering team, with a people-centred approach to development and feedback.
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Demonstrated ability to simplify complex engineering processes - identifying and removing unnecessary complexity rather than building on top of it.
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Confidence to challenge existing ways of working and bring resistant team members through change, including managing performance where necessary.
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Practical understanding of CD tooling - Terraform (with shell scripting), Ansible (with Python scripting), Helm and ArgoCD — sufficient to own the CI/CD boundary and ensure a reliable handover, without responsibility for the CD side.
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Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to varied audiences.
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Comfortable working with GCP (preferred), AWS or Azure - cloud concepts transfer and prior experience on a different platform is not a blocker.
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Solid experience with Kubernetes and container-based architectures.
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Ability to communicate platform capability, status and change to a non-platform engineering audience — treating the CI platform as an internal product with real consumers, and maintaining clear, accessible documentation and updates (e.g. via an intranet or SharePoint site) so engineering teams always know what the platform offers and what's changing.
Desirable
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Experience with agentic AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) - ideally having used them to build or improve platform engineering capability.
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Experience, or genuine curiosity, around orchestrating AI skills as pipeline components - knitting Cursor-executed skills within a VM into CI pipelines rather than relying solely on traditional scripted rules engines.
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Familiarity with quality gate tooling: SonarQube, test coverage frameworks, SAST/DAST scanning.
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Background in or exposure to test automation or TestOps practices.
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Experience treating platform or infrastructure as a product, with a focus on user (developer) experience.
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Knowledge of service meshes and advanced Kubernetes networking concepts.
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GCP professional certifications.
Benefits
At Flooid you will find a fun, professional and supportive environment where people genuinely care about the work they do and the customers they serve.
We value contribution over job titles, encourage openness and collaboration, move quickly, and believe in rolling up our sleeves to get great things done.
Salary: £85,000 - £110,000 depending on experience
Location: Hybrid. You must be UK based. You should be able to travel to the Birmingham, UK office once a week/a few times a month.
Hours: Full time, Monday to Friday.
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Flexible working – To help you manage your personal responsibilities and interests, we offer a range of flexi-working options, including hybrid working, as well as balancing your work responsibilities with other priorities, like picking up your children, caring for an aging parent or attending important events.
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Holidays – We operate a flexible holiday allowance scheme, we recommend employees take around 25-30 days holiday plus public bank holidays per year.
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A flexible pension – We help you prepare for the future with a salary sacrifice pension and annual personal pension reviews with our external partner
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Company sick pay – We offer peace of mind when you are ill with an enhanced Company Sick Pay policy
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Family benefits – We offer a range of support and benefits including enhanced maternity, adoption and paternity pay, enhanced paternity leave and shared parental leave
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Electric Car salary sacrifice scheme – An easy to manage and affordable way of leasing a zero-emission electric vehicle
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Online learning platform –We offer full access to Udemy for all employees, which offers a variety of technical, business and personal development e-learning courses.
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Financial, physical and wellbeing support – To help keep you at your best we provide our team with a health cash plan and if the worst should happen, we have a life assurance scheme
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Access to a discount platform – Treat yourself with discounts and rewards from hundreds of leading retailers, restaurants, and destinations
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Professional subscriptions – We offer reimbursement for professional subscriptions to a relevant institution if it’s required to perform your job role
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Charity giving – support a charity of your choice by gifting money directly from your payroll, saving the national insurance contributions you need to pay
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Cycle to work scheme – Make the most of this tax efficient scheme to improve your commute to work
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Rewarding long service – We provide gifts to our employees who achieve milestone years of service working as part of our team
If you believe you have the skills and experience to carry out this role, although feel you do not meet 100% of the criteria, we encourage you to apply anyway! Research suggests that certain groups of the population will apply for a role if they meet 60% of a roles requirements, while others will only apply if they hit 100% - we encourage applications from anyone with the skills, experience and attributes that will make you a great addition to both the role they are applying and the company overall.
Flooid Ltd. is an Equal Opportunities employer. We are dedicated to fostering, cultivating and preserving a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Please ensure that your application remains a personal reflection of you. We do not use AI to assess applications – every resume is looked at by a real person.
We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive a high volume of applications.
