Lead Platform Engineer, Veda AI
Location: UK Remote
ABOUT CERTINIA
Certinia delivers a Services-as-a-Business platform that powers and connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting. The company’s Professional Services Automation (PSA), Customer Success (CS), and Financial Management (FM) solutions—delivered on Salesforce’s leading cloud platform—provide the ability to run a connected services business, deliver with intelligence, and achieve business agility. Headquartered in Austin, Texas with presence around the world, Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, TA Associates, General Atlantic and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.certinia.com (http://www.certinia.com/).
THE ROLE
As a Lead Platform Engineer you will work in Certinia's Platform Engineering team, leading the technical direction of the platform on which Certinia's AI agents and services run. The platform is Kubernetes on AWS with a service mesh for zero-trust networking, and provides the runtime, identity, AI-gateway, cost-governance and audit layers that let AI workloads operate safely against customer Salesforce data.
You will work across the stack, from the Helm charts and Terraform that provision infrastructure, to the services that make up the platform's authentication and gateway layers, to the CI/CD pipelines and tooling that application teams rely on. Application teams are your primary users; you will help them ship features safely and efficiently.
You will define technical direction across the platform's sub-domains, codify standards and policy, and lead engineers through larger initiatives that span the platform team and beyond. You will work alongside peers of different competencies, lead reviews and retros, and manage and lead on-call responsibility for the platform.
WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE
- Define the technical direction of the platform across its sub-domains.
- Establish and codify the team's best practices, standards and conventions.
- Lead improvements in architecture, performance, reliability and security.
- Diagnose platform issues reported by application teams or by monitoring, and resolve them.
- Detect bad-quality legacy code and infrastructure, and make balanced proposals, considering cost and benefit, to address it.
- Coordinate the work of other engineers across larger phases and epics, including engineers from other teams when initiatives span boundaries.
- Routinely represent the platform team in cross-organisation meetings, security, application engineering, product, SRE, compliance.
- Provide technical leadership by proposing new approaches and technologies and following them through to acceptance or rejection.
- Engage with stakeholders and engineering management to clarify requirements and provide technical input.
- Mentor senior engineers across the platform organisation; contribute to recruitment and to professional development.
- Own incident-response and disaster-recovery process when required.
WHAT YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE
- Deep experience in a meaningful programming language, we write Go, but are happy with experience in Java, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, C# or another systems-or-services language.
- An extensive track record of designing, building and operating production platforms at scale.
- Deep experience with Kubernetes, beyond using it, including the ecosystem (controllers, control-plane, operators, admission control, networking, storage).
- Deep experience with at least one major public cloud, AWS preferred, but extensive experience in another major cloud is acceptable.
- Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred) at scale, multi-account, multi-environment, with rigorous review and state-management discipline.
- Experience with CI/CD at scale, designing pipelines, managing release artefacts, and integrating quality gates.
- Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/HTTP, DNS, TLS, mTLS, service identity.
- Proven ability to deliver high-quality, complex platform work to time, scope and quality.
- Experience coordinating and leading other engineers, formally or informally.
- Strong communication and influencing skills, you can negotiate technical direction with peers, explain trade-offs to engineering and product leadership, and partner with security and SRE to land cross-cutting improvements.
- Comfortable assessing, learning and introducing new technology.
- A clear position on what makes a good platform, and the judgement to recognise when our context calls for something different.
WHAT ELSE WOULD BE GREAT
- Hands-on experience with EKS or another managed Kubernetes service in production.
- Significant experience with a service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), including authorization, mTLS, identity propagation and traffic management at production scale.
- Significant experience designing zero-trust networking and identity for microservices.
- Experience with platform observability at scale (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing).
- Familiarity with the Atlassian suite (Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence).
- Advanced cloud, architecture or security certifications.
- Prior experience operating an internal developer platform that served an organisation.
We are committed to equality of opportunity for all; applications from individuals are encouraged regardless of age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.
