Staff Platform Engineer

RVU group; Cardiff; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech-driven company in Cardiff is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to enhance its platform capabilities. The role emphasizes collaboration across teams, autonomy in technical decisions, and a commitment to continuous improvement. With a focus on building robust, scalable systems, the ideal candidate will have deep experience in cloud platforms and agile methodologies. This position includes hybrid working options, a discretionary bonus, and various employee benefits for personal and professional development.

Benefits

Discretionary yearly bonus

Hybrid working approach

Employer matching pension contributions

Work from Home budget

Private medical cover

Free gym access

Learning and training budget

Qualifications

• Experience in building and designing APIs or CLIs.
• Solid understanding of platform reliability engineering approaches.
• Knowledge of incident and problem management practices.

Responsibilities

• Work alongside engineering teams to utilize modern technology.
• Define and apply team processes for platform operations.
• Mentor and coach engineers within the organization.

Skills

Experience working in agile teams

Cloud platform design (preferably Azure)

Deep knowledge of Kubernetes

Proficient in software development lifecycle

Job description

Staff Platform Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Cardiff

Description

Hybrid working - 2 days per week in Cardiff office required. We're also open to hiring this role at Senior level for the right candidate.

Confused.com is the UK’s first comparison platform for car insurance. We’ve been helping customers since 2002 by empowering them to make better decisions around insurance and financial services. Our mission is simple; take away the confusion when comparing financial products and services to help you save time and money.

We’re part of RVU, a group of online brands (including Uswitch, Tempcover, and Money.co.uk) that empowers people to make confident decisions across a range of household services. RVU’s purpose is to simplify complex marketplaces with intuitive and accessible applications that genuinely improve people’s lives. Saving a few hundred pounds a year on bills makes a fundamental difference to vulnerable people who sometimes have to choose between paying for utilities or groceries.

Platform Engineering @ Confused.com

Our platforms serve millions of users a month, process thousands of comparisons a day, and drive hundreds of complex integrations with vastly different partners. We’re a tech‑driven business that focuses on agile delivery and cross functional product teams.

Our platform teams enable our customer facing teams by providing tooling and solutions that help them to deliver change quickly, safely and securely – all whilst providing an excellent developer experience and operational excellence. We are looking for passionate, empathetic engineers to build highly performant, scalable, and reliable solutions that enable our internal engineering teams to be high performers.

What you’ll be doing

Excellence: Work alongside established & experienced engineering teams, whilst supporting and growing the organisation’s understanding & utilisation of modern technology.

Collaboration: Work with various cross‑functional disciplines across the organisation to make ideas a reality, whilst taking an active role in shaping and delivering the ongoing technical vision of the organisation alongside your peers.

Autonomy: Authority over technical strategy, decisions and implementation approach, so you can deliver using practices that align with your preferred ways of working.

Data Driven: Utilise rich logs, metrics, and data to monitor and improve system performance, cost, security & reliability.

Culture: Enhancing a diverse engineering culture by taking part in various technical catch ups, working groups and all hands.

Experience: Enrich RVU’s perspective by sharing your experience, knowledge & expertise in a continuous learning environment.

As a key member of the platform engineering team you will be accountable for the following:

• Objective setting, feature ideation, development and measurement
• Architectural decisions and designs of the platform, domains and systems
• Defining, evolving, and applying team processes
• Responsible for the entire stack to meet business requirements
• Building efficient CI/CD pipelines and robust DevOps practices
• Utilising a variety of infrastructure to keep systems performant, scalable & reliable
• Mentoring and coaching engineers, and presenting knowledge and information back to the wider organisation

As a Staff Platform Engineer at Confused.com you will be expected to:

• Proactively identify opportunities for improvement across the organisation
• Manage your time effectively between team and org level contributions
• Rotate around the business to build relationships and act as a multiplier

What we look for in you

• Experience working in large and small agile teams of engineers, working together to solve problems, deliver outcomes, and building and operating highly available, scale and performant consumer-facing solutions
• Experience of building and designing cost optimised Cloud platforms (preferably Azure) from the ground up, following well architected principles
• Solid understanding of platform and reliability engineering approaches (SRE), including observability, performance optimisation, capturing analytics and security best practices
• Experience developing and rolling out Service Level Objectives across an organisation and using them to drive error budgets and alerting
• Deep knowledge and experience with operating containers at scale within the Kubernetes ecosystem
• Experience in building robust, fault tolerant systems and identifying areas for improvement all in the support of maintaining reliability standards
• Knowledge of incident and problem management practices
• Proficiency in the software development lifecycle, including testing, version control, branching strategies and deployments approaches
• Pragmatic approach to deliver effective solutions to address business & consumer challenges
• Experience building and designing APIs or CLIs that solve internal problems or deliver self service solutions for engineers.
• Committed to your own development and excited to make a direct, substantial impact within a company that provides you with full autonomy to release changes daily

You don’t need to tick off everything on this list - so don’t let that hold you back from applying. We want to make sure you’re learning plenty during your time with us!

What we offer

We want to give you a great work environment, support your growth both personally and professionally, and provide benefits that make your time at RVU even more enjoyable. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to:

• 10% discretionary yearly bonus and yearly pay reviews (based on RVU and personal performance)
• A hybrid working approach with 2 in‑office days per week and up to 22 working days per year to “work from anywhere”
• Employer matching pension contributions up to 7.5%
• A one‑off £300 “Work from Home” budget to help contribute towards a great work environment at home
• Excellent maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption leave policy, for those key moments in your life
• 25 days holiday (increasing to 30 days) + 2 days “My Time” per year
• Private medical cover, critical illness cover , dental plans and employee assistance programme
• Free gym access
• Employee discounts programme
• A healthy learning and training budget to support your development
• Electric vehicle and cycle to work schemes
• Regular events - from team socials to company-wide events with insightful external speakers, we want to make sure our colleagues continue to feel connected