Lead Platform Engineer

Qodea is Europe’s leading Google Cloud specialist consultancy. We're a team that’s energised by innovation and delivering exceptional results for our clients. We deliver cutting edge solutions across data & analytics, AI, cloud infrastructure or security that drive digital transformation and enable our customers to scale, modernise and thrive.

In joining Qodea, you’ll work alongside specialists in their field and would have access to mentoring, industry-recognised training and certifications, and personalised development plans to support your career growth.

We’re always looking for motivated and energetic people who are eager to learn and grow, so if you want to supercharge your career, join Qodea!

Role Overview:

As a Lead Platform Engineer for Qodea, you will be at the forefront of cloud technology using your skills for a variety of undertakings. Using your in-depth technical knowledge and experience, coupled with a keen sense of business concerns and priorities, you will become a highly trusted advisor to our customers and drive internal standards.

Working closely with a team of engineers on our contracts, you will ensure that the projects we develop for those customers and services being proposed are appropriate and aligned to customers’ requirements.

The technical aspects of your role will be a balance of carrying out ‘hands-on’ billable delivery work and thought leadership, combined with an eagerness to develop new improved ways of doing things. Your keen eye to details and expertise on how efficiency should be achieved, engaging with the Google technical community, and driving the adoption of new technology through the development of internal tools and customer offerings, shall all be part of your day to day job. You will also keep up to date with emerging technologies, and regularly complete professional certifications.

Whilst you'll be aligned to your area of expertise, as part of a growing organisation you will get opportunities to broaden your technical area of expertise through exposure to the wide array of customers Qodea have.

What you’ll do:

• Act as a trusted advisor to customers, developing a deep understanding of their technical challenges and leveraging GCP technologies, patterns and practices to address them effectively.
• Provide expert technical guidance and mentorship to platform engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement
• Design highly available, cloud native platforms tailored to customer needs
• Advise customers on modern software development and architecture techniques such as 12 factor applications, microservices and serverless architectures
• Develop internal tooling for the wider Platform Team, that can help us to do more, and be more effective
• Develop and implement with your team’s help, automations and ways of working with the sole objective of increasing the efficiency within the team.
• Collaborate with customers and our Pre-sales Team/ CSM team to translate requirements into technical designs and guide the process through to solution delivery
• Act as a trustworthy advisor for our customers, ensuring they will obtain the best advice and required guidance on what the solution for their business needs could be.
• Identify the long term impact of designs, advising stakeholders of the risk and suggesting potential secure solutions, or involving the relevant stakeholders from within Qodea.
• Proactively pursue the decision making process required to drive the team to success, including potential cost analysis based on (amongst other things) time management related conclusions.
• Partner with our support teams to support the shift left activities
• Keep abreast of technology developments, ensuring the Qodea business remains ahead of the technology curve.
• Represent Qodea in external engagements with Google and the wider tech community, when applicable. We can align this to your strengths, for example technical writing or presenting at events.

Requirements

What you’ll bring:

• Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Strong experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments, with a deep understanding of container orchestration and management.
• Proficient in infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, and comfortable with configuration management tooling such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or Salt.
• Expert-level understanding of Linux operating systems (e.g., Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS) with experience in some systems administration and troubleshooting
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, such as Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar pipelines, with a focus on automation and reliability
• Solid knowledge of modern internet protocols and patterns, including but not limited to GRPC, GraphQL, REST APIs, and related tools.
• Proven experience in a cloud focussed delivery role (DevOps or Software Development)
• You’re proactive and you like to solve problems. You want to get involved and make things happen, ensuring the best outcomes for your team, the business and our customers
• Previous experience in a consultancy or professional services role
• Previous experience in a leadership type of role
• Solid knowledge of cloud architecture principles and highly available systems
• Understanding of application development, delivery and infrastructure automation
• Comfortable writing production-quality software in at least one general-purpose programming language (e.g. Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, C++)

Desirable Experience and Qualifications:

• Experience working in multi-cloud or with hybrid-cloud architectures
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Logging and Monitoring) with an understanding of reliability engineering
• Familiarity with cloud security frameworks (e.g. HashiCorp Vault, IAM best practices, container security tools)
• Professional certifications in GCP/AWS
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator or other Kubernetes-related certifications

How you’ll grow:

• In line with our contracts and our business needs, you will be exposed to and required to drive various levels of complexity assignments.
• You will be supported and empowered to fully manage your team’s capability and skills
• You will be able to identify, propose & drive the implementation of opportunities for improvement;
• You will have the opportunity, the support & the empowerment required to review and establish how things should be conducted, in order for us to be set up for success.
• You will conduct or assign resources to new clients onboarding
• You will achieve the required Google certifications within the first 6 months from joining, which would ensure you have the right level of understanding for us to build upon;
• You will also be gradually managing the people element of job, ensuring the relevant skillset and experience is allocated to each contract/ task;

Benefits

• Health Care package

• NN Assurance package (life and health)
• 10 learning days per year
• Regular opportunities for industry recognised training and certifications
• Opportunities to develop within a fast growing-tech business with ambitious growth and impact goals
• 28 days PTO + 15 days Bank Holidays and your birthday off
• Length of service awards
• Sabbatical leave for employees over 5 years service
• Meal tickets
• Transportation costs
• Bookster Platform
• Company events - opportunities to meet colleagues you don’t see every day

Diversity and Inclusion Statement

At Qodea, we champion diversity and inclusion. We believe that a career in IT should be open to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability or neurotype. We value the unique talents and perspectives that each individual brings to our team, and we strive to create a fair and accessible hiring process for all. If you feel we can improve in any way, please reach out to our careers team via email at careers@qodea.com or connect with us on LinkedIn via our Qodea Company Page.