Job Specifications
Summary of the Role
The Lead Platform Engineer provides strategic technical leadership for Lhasa’s cloud-native platform engineering initiatives, establishing architectural standards and operational practices that enable scalable SaaS product delivery. They drive the evolution of developer experience through self-service platforms, GitOps workflows, and comprehensive observability solutions.
Leading a team of platform engineers, they mentor technical talent whilst collaborating with stakeholders across the organisation to align platform capabilities with business objectives. The Lead Platform Engineer owns service production reliability, implements DORA and Core 4 metrics for continuous improvement, and ensures compliance with security standards in high-value data environments. They balance strategic cloud platform planning with hands-on technical execution to deliver world-class engineering platforms.
Why Lhasa Limited?
We are a successful not-for-profit company and educational charity, with a great reputation for collaborative scientific development.
We develop meaningful science and software that supports the delivery of life-enhancing solutions including the development of safe chemicals to market including drugs and cosmetics as well as making a positive contribution to reducing animal testing.
Our charitable status enables us to make altruistic decisions for the public benefit and to work with some of the leading organisations in the world to really make a difference.
Our salaries are competitive dependent upon skills and experience. We also offer fantastic personal benefits including (but not limited to); 34 days holiday plus bank holidays, a generous pension scheme, healthcare cashback, PMI, free car parking at our office in Leeds City Centre and much more!
Main Responsibilities
include but are not limited to:
Leadership
Strategic leadership of the platform engineering team, developing talent at all levels.
Lead the team's vision, strategy and roadmap for platform engineering initiatives, ensuring they are aligned with broader organisational goals.
Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the platform engineering team and across tech teams
Manage team capacity planning and resource allocation, balancing feature delivery with operational excellence and technical debt reduction
Collaborate with stakeholders to drive organisational change management for platform adoption.
Technical Leadership & Cloud Platform Strategy
Lead implementation of DORA and Core 4 metrics whilst establishing operating models for SaaS product delivery
Coach and mentor engineers on Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and GitOps good practices whilst reviewing infrastructure changes
Design GitOps workflows using ArgoCD and architect self-service capabilities through Backstage portal
Plan cloud platform (internally and AWS), managing cost optimisation and infrastructure budgets
Establish platform standards for cloud, containerisation, orchestration, observability, security, and CI/CD practices
Developer Experience & Service Management
Enhance Backstage portal with personalised dashboards and Software Templates for common patterns
Own production SaaS infrastructure reliability, providing third-line support for escalations
Design robust CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins whilst managing multi-cluster Kubernetes environments
Implement security good practices (RBAC, network policies) and disaster recovery strategies
Partner with Product Teams and Member Services to understand customer requirements and address platform needs
Observability & Continuous Improvement
Maintain observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki) with comprehensive SLIs/SLOs and alerting
Create runbooks and incident response procedures
Drive cost optimisation strategies for internal cloud and AWS infrastructure
Eliminate toil through automation and optimise deployment pipelines for reliability improvements
Research new technologies and evolve platform based on industry good practices
Collaboration & Standards
Partner with security teams on compliance in high-value data environments
Facilitate platform engineering community of practice and coordinate with product teams on planning
Document architectural decisions and ensure consistent tool adoption across teams
Mentor and coach engineers on platform technologies and best practices
Review code and infrastructure changes from team members
Skills and Knowledge
Essential
5+ years designing cloud infrastructure with proven track record of owning production SaaS platforms
Expert Kubernetes orchestration including multi-cluster management and resource optimisation
Experience architecting cloud infrastructure across multiple providers with cost management ownership
Hands-on GitOps experience with ArgoCD and Helm for continuous deployment
Proficiency in IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, Ansible) and observability platforms
Knowledge of security standards and compliance in high-value dat
About the Company
At Lhasa, we are driven by our purpose; To enable informed decision making on chemical safety. As a not-for-profit organisation and educational charity, we create cutting-edge software technology which streamlines compound development and minimises animal testing. Our technology is designed by scientists, for scientists, in collaboration with industry stakeholders and regulators. Learn more about how we can support your chemical safety assessments: https://ow.ly/l8kL50Q79w4.
Based in Leeds, we provide hybrid and flexible wo...
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