Company Overview
IMS is a world-leading connected insurance and telematics provider, delivering services, analytics, and technology to insurers, governments, and enterprises. We are a globally distributed team united by a shared mission: using data as a force for good to make driving Safer. Smarter. Greener.
We believe the best solutions come from the intersection of different ideas. At IMS, we take an inclusive approach to how we build, deliver and commercialise our technology. If you're passionate about technology that has a real-world impact, we'd love to hear from you.
Job Description
The Senior Platform Engineer is a technical leader responsible for designing, operating, and continuously improving the AWS serverless data platform. This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure, software engineering, and developer experience — owning the reliability and scalability of the platform while actively enabling product and data engineering teams to build and ship confidently.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Tooling & Self Service
- Design and maintain self-service tooling, templates, and scaffolding that allow engineers to provision and deploy serverless resources independently.
- Own and evolve internal developer platform (IDP) capabilities — including CI/CD pipeline templates, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, and reusable Lambda/Step Functions patterns.
- Reduce cognitive overhead for engineers by abstracting platform complexity behind well-documented, opinionated interfaces.
- Partner with engineering teams to gather feedback and continuously improve the developer experience.
Engineering Standards & Technical Documentation
- Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records (ADRs) for the platform.
- Define and evangelise engineering standards for serverless development, including naming conventions, logging patterns, error handling, and observability.
- Lead or contribute to internal tech talks, workshops, and onboarding programmes to upskill engineers on platform capabilities.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
- Act as a trusted technical partner to product and data engineering squads, embedding platform expertise into delivery teams as needed.
- Define clear SLAs and SLOs for platform services and communicate them to consuming teams.
- Triage and resolve platform-related blockers rapidly, prioritising unblocking engineers over reactive maintenance work.
Security & Compliance
- Ensure platform infrastructure adheres to security best practices including least-privilege IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, and secrets management.
- Collaborate with security and compliance stakeholders to maintain audit readiness and address vulnerabilities promptly.
- Embed security considerations into platform tooling so that secure defaults are the path of least resistance for engineers.
Infrastructure as Code & Delivery
- Own and evolve IaC for all platform infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation.
- Enforce GitOps and CI/CD best practices across platform delivery, ensuring changes are peer-reviewed, tested, and deployed safely.
- Champion progressive delivery practices — including feature flags, canary deployments, and rollback mechanisms — across the platform.
Continuous Improvement
- Drive a culture of continuous improvement through regular platform reviews, blameless post-mortems, and iterative delivery.
- Measure and report on engineering metrics to demonstrate and drive improvement.
- Contribute to the broader engineering community through internal knowledge sharing, cross-team collaboration, and participation in guild or chapter activities.
Key Requirements
- WS Serverless & Cloud Architecture Deep, hands-on experience with the core serverless stack — Candidate should be able to design pipelines with cost, latency, and failure modes in mind, not just get things working. Knowledge of AWS IAM, VPC, and security patterns is equally important.
- Python Strong Python skills are essential — not just scripting, but writing production-quality, testable, maintainable code. Candidate needs to be credible enough to review Python code written by the teams they support. Java familiarity matters for legacy pipeline work and cross-language debugging, but doesn't need to be at the same depth.
- Infrastructure as Code Proficiency in Terraform is a must. Candidate should be building reusable, well-structured IaC modules — not one-off configurations — and comfortable working in a GitOps model with peer-reviewed, pipeline-deployed infrastructure.
- CI/CD & Developer Platform Thinking Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines The key mindset here is thinking about other engineers as your customers, and building tooling that reduces friction and cognitive load.
- Observability & Operational Maturity Comfortable with CloudWatch, and ideally a third-party observability tool. They should understand SLOs and error budgets beyond the theory — and know how to design alerting that's actually actionable rather than noisy.
- Communication & Developer Empathy Given the developer enablement focus, this is crucial. Candidate needs to write clear documentation, give useful feedback in code reviews, and explain complex infrastructure decisions to non-platform engineers. Strong written communication matters as much as verbal.
- Security Mindset Practical knowledge of least-privilege IAM, secrets management and how to bake secure defaults into platform tooling so teams don't have to think about it.
Why should you join us?
- Flexible remote working options.
- Flexible holiday scheme (unlimited vacation) to really make the most of your time and wellbeing.
- 'Work From Anywhere' Policy - work almost anywhere in the world for 30 days per year!
- Employee Assistance Program and an enhanced maternity/paternity package
- We want to see you grow and do great things! We’re committed to your personal and professional development.
- Funded training opportunities.
- Death in Service Protection.
- Auto-Enrolment Pension & Private Medical Insurance.
- Cycle to Work and Car Maintenance Salary Sacrifice discounts!
- Kudos Hub - a peer-to-peer recognition system, where you can recognise others using points. These points can be collected and redeemed against a huge catalogue of rewards.
- We’re an innovative technology leader with plans for growth in the global telematics industry. These are some exciting times!
- Please note that while we accommodate a remote working environment, this hire will need to be based in the United Kingdom.
