Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

Department: Technology / Engineering

Reporting to: Platform Engineering Tech Lead / Manager

Location: Hybrid - Office travel on average once per month, London Waterloo

Also participate in an on-call rota, covering one week every six weeks

Why this role exists

FairPlay Sports Media is building a tech-led, AI and data-powered sports media network that serves both owned brands (e.g., oddschecker, WhoScored.com, SuperScommesse, and others) and partners with BetTech products spanning data, display, and predictive capabilities. At FairPlay scale - real-time data, high-frequency updates, and partner integrations - the Platform team provides the infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and observability that let multiple engineering teams ship and operate reliable, compliant, high-throughput products.

Our busiest moments - major sporting events, new market launches, and B2B partner go-lives - are when the platform matters most, and the Platform team makes sure the foundations hold.

We are looking for a hands-on, pragmatic Platform Engineer (DevOps / Infrastructure) to own and deliver components within our Google Cloud Platform estate - across CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and Kubernetes-based workloads.

You’ll take part in the on-call rotation, automate away operational toil, apply secure-by-default practices to everything you build, and support product development squads with the environments, pipelines, and tooling they need to move quickly and safely. You’ll work with limited oversight on 2–3 month pieces of work and contribute to larger initiatives led by Senior engineers.

Pillar 1: Platform Engineering & Delivery

Building dependable automation so developers can ship confidently:

Pillar 2: Reliability & Operations

Keeping the platform healthy and the team ready for peak events:

Pillar 3: Security & Compliance

Building security in from the start:

Working with others

• Experience: 3–5 years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Engineering within a modern cloud environment, delivering production infrastructure with limited oversight.
• GCP & Containers: Solid hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (Compute, IAM, VPC, GKE, Cloud Storage, managed data services) and containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Proficient with Terraform - modules, state management, and reviewing changes safely.
• CI/CD: Proficient at building and debugging pipelines (GitLab CI or similar), including artifact handling and deployment strategies.
• Observability: Proficient with metrics, logs, and traces; has built dashboards and actionable alerting and understands SLIs/SLOs.
• Linux & Networking: Proficient with Linux systems (processes, filesystems, systemd, shell) and a working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and VPC networking.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficient in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash, and able to read the others.
• Operations: Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation and handling common incidents calmly and methodically.
• Security Fundamentals: Working knowledge of secure-by-default practices in cloud infrastructure: least privilege, secrets management, safe configuration.
• Experience with high-traffic or real-time systems (sports, betting, finance, media streaming).
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) with an understanding of context management, sub-agents, MCP, and hooks.
• Experience with GitOps-style workflows (e.g. Argo CD or Flux) for managing Kubernetes and infrastructure changes.
• Exposure to policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest, Sentinel, or similar) and security scanning in pipelines.
• Exposure to security or compliance practices in regulated environments (e.g. gambling regulation, SOC 2, ISO 27001).
• Cost and efficiency awareness in cloud environments (rightsizing, committed use, FinOps practices).
• Relevant certifications (GCP Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect, CKA).
• Ownership & Pragmatism: You take initiative, pursue problems to resolution, and balance speed with care - and know when to raise a trade-off rather than decide alone.
• Calm under Pressure: You stay methodical during incidents, ask for help early, and follow through on the actions that stop it happening again.
• Communication & Collaboration: You explain technical decisions clearly to developers and teammates, write documentation people actually use, and give and receive constructive review feedback.
• Curiosity & Growth: You’re keen to learn across the full breadth of the platform and to help those around you learn too.