Platform Engineer (National Security)

Location: Opportunities available across Gloucestershire, Manchester and London
Hybrid: Secure-site working patterns vary by programme
Salary: £40,000 – £80,000 plus bonus and benefits, depending on experience and SFIA grading
Clearance: Active DV / eDV clearance preferred

The Opportunity

You will be joining a growing engineering consultancy delivering secure software and platform capability into highly classified National Security and Defence environments.

The organisation has built a strong reputation for combining modern engineering practices with a genuinely collaborative and engineering-led culture. Teams remain intentionally small, giving engineers broader technical exposure, closer collaboration with leadership and far greater influence over delivery than is typical within larger defence primes.

Many engineers join from larger organisations looking for less process-heavy delivery structures, broader project exposure and the opportunity to work more closely with both customers and engineering teams.

The environment particularly appeals to engineers who enjoy working alongside smart, pragmatic people solving difficult problems collaboratively rather than operating inside narrow technical silos.

As the organisation continues expanding capability across both West and North sites, there is a strong focus on maintaining engineering quality, community and reputation as the teams grow.

There are also increasingly clear opportunities to progress into architecture and leadership roles as the business continues to scale.

The Role

As a Platform Engineer you will help design, build and operate the infrastructure and tooling that underpins secure software delivery across a range of National Security programmes.

You will work closely with software engineers, architects and operational stakeholders to improve automation, scalability, operational resilience and secure delivery practices across cloud and containerised environments.

Typical responsibilities include:

• Building and maintaining secure infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform and Ansible
• Deploying and operating containerised platforms using Docker and Kubernetes
• Supporting cloud-native platform delivery across AWS and Azure environments
• Designing and improving CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery workflows
• Implementing observability and monitoring using tooling such as Grafana, Elastic Stack and cloud-native monitoring platforms
• Supporting platform reliability, operational resilience and secure delivery practices across engineering teams
• Contributing to modernisation programmes involving secure data environments and legacy platform transformation
• Collaborating directly with multidisciplinary teams and customers to evolve platform standards, tooling and automation approaches

The teams tend to value pragmatic engineers who can communicate well, work closely with stakeholders and balance technical quality with real-world operational constraints.

The organisation places far more emphasis on engineering mindset, adaptability and collaborative delivery than on matching a rigid checklist of technologies.

These roles are particularly well suited to engineers who enjoy broad technical exposure and operating across cloud infrastructure, automation and secure software delivery rather than specialising in a single narrow technology area.

Security Requirements

Due to the nature of the work, active UK*C DV clearance is preferred. Candidates should typically be sole UK nationals and willing to travel to secure customer sites where required.

Benefits

• 10% clearance bonus
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Buy or sell up to 5 days leave per year
• 8% employer pension contribution
• Private healthcare
• Life assurance
• EV car scheme via salary sacrifice
• EMI share scheme
• Flexible working and flexi-time
• Dedicated training allowance and individual development plans

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