Senior/Staff Platform Engineer
Why are we hiring for this role?
This is a rare opportunity to shape a platform engineering function from its early days. You won't be inheriting someone else's decisions. You'll be defining the foundational systems, standards, and internal platforms that UpGuard's engineering organisation will build on for years.
As a Platform Engineer, you'll own the platforms, tools and infrastructure that power our development workflows, improving reliability, streamlining operations, and enhancing the developer experience across our product engineering teams. The function sits at the heart of our engineering organisation, and you'll have genuine autonomy and influence: defining the roadmap, driving best practices, and scaling our systems as we grow.
We're open to hiring at either the Senior or Staff level, and we'll calibrate the level, scope, and compensation based on your experience.
Champion a "platform as a product" mindset, regularly gathering feedback from engineering teams and iterating to improve the developer experience
Design, build and maintain scalable, reliable infrastructure on Google Cloud to support our growing product needs
Collaborate closely with developers to streamline local and CI/CD workflows, and champion platform best practices
Evolve our observability stack - ensuring teams have the monitoring, logging and alerting they need to move quickly and confidently
Implement and maintain secure-by-default patterns for networking, secrets management, IAM, and workload isolation
Accelerate and complete the adoption of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and GitOps to achieve consistent and auditable infrastructure changes
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (preferably Terraform/OpenTofu) on a major cloud platform (ideally Google Cloud)
5+ years of relevant engineering experience at tech-centric and ideally product-driven companies
A strong software engineering foundation and a developer-first mindset
Hands-on experience with containerization, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD pipelines
A track record of improving developer experience through better tooling, streamlined workflows, and a documentation-first culture
Experience with relational database design, performance tuning and operations at scale, ideally with PostgreSQL
Experience scaling infrastructure to support multi-region architectures and growing engineering teams
Strong backend engineering skills, particularly in Go
A practical approach to cloud cost optimisation, with experience in identifying and implementing efficiency improvements
Experience building internal platforms as products - with a focus on roadmap definition, adoption and developer enablement
Practical experience in product security, including embedding security best practices early in the SDLC and shifting security left