Summary:
Flowbird, Poole is seeking a Platform Engineer to join the DevOps team, which supplies Smart Transport
solutions around the world. Primary customers are government bodies operating transport systems who
increasingly are wanting a service-based offering for their solutions.
The successful candidate will fill an exciting role in the growth areas of the company. Flowbird requires an
experienced Platform Engineer who can demonstrate previous experience of leading companies through
successful cloud migrations and implementations. You should be an avid fan of technology, constantly keeping
abreast of change in this ever-changing domain.
Through an expert knowledge of cloud computing platforms (IaaS & PaaS) you will help guide and be involved
in development of our cloud platform. You will have excellent interpersonal skills as this role will mean working
alongside many teams throughout the product lifecycle, from design phase through to the live operation. You
will be able to demonstrate an intimate knowledge in how to build reliable, highly available systems which fulfil
the needs of the business and dovetail with the development team to ensure overall system excellence.
Responsibilities:
• Own the cloud Infrastructure from design through to deployment and operation.
• Be the local expert and evangelist on IaC, promoting through all teams.
• Be responsible for the reliability of the SaaS platform that will be our main growth area.
• Work with various project stakeholders to ensure that all requirements are understood and fed into a
single product view.
• Work with architects and engineering to ensure that the system (platform and software) adheres to the
qualities as stated in the architectural description.
• Work with various teams to ensure that the CI/CD pipeline for IaC works as seamlessly as the code
pipeline.
Participate:
• Work closely with the Engineering and Product teams to provide an operational voice being present
throughout the lifecycle.
• Be a key participant into the DevOps working group within Flowbird
• Proactively seeking to enhance DevOps culture by removing silos between traditional functional teams
• Work closely with the software and architecture teams to collaboratively define patterns for software
which work with the platform to achieve required system qualities.
Platform Engineer – May 2022 Page 2 of 2
Experience:
• Have proven experience building highly available, reliable platforms which support enterprise
applications.
• You should have experience of best practices in terms of abstractions so that the primary focus shall be
on a SaaS offering, but deployments can still be made locally for those customers who have a
requirement to do so.
• Have experience of securely connecting to physical devices which are deployed around the world.
• Strong candidates will have experience of how to craft environments that support good practices for the
development team such as auto scaling, blue green deployments, auto failover etc.
• Knowledge of tools and practices to ensure that the platform is up to date in terms of security patching
and CVE monitoring.
• Securing multi tenanted cloud environments, including integrations to multiple on premise locations.
• Ideally be certified against at least one cloud provider.
• Ideally have experience of multiple regional deployments to facilitate data residency requirements
Core Skills:
• In depth knowledge of cloud architecture patterns and principles (e.g. Microservices, 12 Factor app,
Enterprise integration Patterns) and best practice
• Be an expert in at least one cloud provider and its associated IaC scripting language (this can include
Ansible and Terraforn)
• Docker orchestration tools; Rancher, Kubernetes, Helm
• Monitoring solutions for cloud environments, to proactively alert operations on unusual situations
Provisioning tools such as Ansible
• Service Discovery; Consul, Vault etc.
• Excellent time management and working to deadlines
• Knowledge of containerisation and RKE2
• Any experience with Vmware vsphere and Opensuse JEOS would be useful too.
Behavioural Factors:
• Ability to informally lead and drive cultural changes through the organisation
• Be able to mentor other team members who wish to become involved in building our infrastructure
• Be able to ensure best practice whilst juggling customer commitments
• Capable of making decisions independently
• Self-motivated, self-starting
• Instinctive problem solver
• Attention to detail
• Willing to apply skill set to other added value activities
Reports to:
• Platform Team Manager