Senior Platform Engineer

Role Description

Platform at Sendcloud is structured around two focused teams. Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure — EKS, VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, and Terraform modules — the engine room everything runs on. Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer — CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, observability tooling, and DORA metrics — the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely.

• As the Senior Platform Engineer, you own real infrastructure and tooling within Foundation Platform or Developer Platform end to end, from a well-scoped problem through to production.
• You combine deep hands-on engineering with the judgement to make sound architectural calls inside your area of ownership, acting as a natural point of reference for the engineers around you.
• This is a step up from a Platform Engineer role: more ownership, more autonomy, and a genuine voice in how the team designs and operates the platform.
• It's a deliberate stepping stone toward Staff Engineer scope — you build the track record of independently-owned, well-executed initiatives that case rests on.

Technical Ownership & Execution

• Independently design, build, and operate platform services and infrastructure components within your area, from a well-scoped problem through to production.
• Make sound architectural decisions for medium-complexity, well-bounded problems, escalating and documenting trade-offs via ADRs when they reach beyond your immediate scope.
• Apply Infrastructure-as-Code, Kubernetes, and AWS best practices to keep services reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware.
• Lead at least one substantial roadmap item per planning cycle, planning and estimating it without requiring detailed external specification.
• Proactively find and fix what's broken — flaky pipelines, undocumented runbooks, unowned resources — without waiting to be asked.

Delivery & Collaboration

• Plan and deliver platform work within the team's six-week planning cycles, splitting larger initiatives into shippable increments.
• Coordinate with the other Platform team, Product Engineering, and stakeholders when your work has cross-team dependencies.
• Participate in the on-call rota, respond to incidents with urgency, and write clear, blameless post-mortems for incidents within your area.
• Contribute to Peak Season preparation and other organisation-wide operational programmes.
• Take part in the Engineering Hiring Interviewer Pool, helping assess platform engineering candidates.

Must have

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including at least 2 years focused on platform, infrastructure, or SRE work.
• Solid AWS experience across core services: EKS, VPC/networking, IAM, RDS, S3, and at least one of CloudFront, WAF, or Lambda.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and Helm, including troubleshooting workloads and understanding RBAC and cluster operations.
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform, including writing and maintaining reusable modules.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and understanding the principles of progressive delivery (canary, blue-green).
• Working knowledge of observability practices — metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLO/SLI thinking (Datadog or equivalent).
• A security-conscious mindset: IAM hygiene, secrets management, and awareness of compliance basics (SOC2, GDPR).
• Strong written and verbal English — you can explain a technical trade-off clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Strong advantage (nice to have)

• Experience operating a platform in a SaaS scale-up context — you understand the gap between a startup's infrastructure and a platform with real enterprise-grade commitments.
• Exposure to event-driven architecture (NATS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) in a multi-tenant environment.
• FinOps awareness — cost-per-service thinking, rightsizing, and the ability to spot wasteful infrastructure.
• Prior mentoring experience, whether formal or informal.

🎉 Benefits

💸 Salary - From €80,000 gross annually, inclusive of 8% holiday pay (based on your specific skillset and professional background).

🧠 Brain Benefits - €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team

🌴 Time Benefits - 28 days of paid vacations per year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones

✈️ Sabbatical Benefits - 4 weeks fully paid every 3 years

🏡 Home Benefits - Flexible hybrid model (min. 1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget

💪 Body Benefits - Company gym · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee

🚌 Travel Benefits - Monthly commuting allowance

🪑 Future Benefits - Pension scheme · Employee discount programs

🐾 Vibe Benefits - Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar