Reporting to: Head of Architecture & Engineering
Main Purpose of Role
The Mail Metrics Senior Platform Engineer is a hands-on engineering role responsible for driving implementation quality and day-to-day co-ordination of critical change and continuous improvement activity that ensures the operational health, stability, and performance of the Mail Metrics platform.
The role supports a team of Platform Engineers aligned to core platform areas (Suite, Engine and Print House) with backlog prioritisation, workload distribution, platform hygiene, and L3 support provision.
The Senior Platform Engineer collaborates closely with QA, Architecture, Product Development, Product Management and Service Operations to ensure that the platform is supportable, observable, and delivered with technical integrity.
Role Description
Team Support & Co-ordination
- Line manage a team of Mail Metrics Platform Engineers
- Set priorities, track progress, and manage team capacity around operational and support workloads
- Support workload distribution and task ownership across Platform Engineers
- Coach engineers on technical approaches, operational practices, and delivery standards fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration and continuous improvement
- Escalate performance or resourcing concerns to the Head of Architecture & Engineering
Technical Implementation
- Working in collaboration with the Architecture function and Product Development Component Leads translate technical specifications and designs into work packages that deliver robust, supportable, and scalable platform improvements
- Provide guidance to Platform Engineers for implementation, ensuring clarity, feasibility and consistency, supporting with the resolution of blockers, and tracking progress
- Maintain design integrity through peer reviews, technical checkpoints, and development oversight — ensuring alignment with agreed specifications
- Maintain implementation integrity through pull requests, test execution and documentation – ensuring alignment with agreed patterns and standards
- Implement infrastructure, configuration, and deployment automation as part of day-to-day delivery
Operational Execution & Incident Response
- Act as trusted partner for Service Operations during platform incidents and support escalations
- Co-ordinate incident triage, resolution activities, and post-incident reviews with Service Operations, Product Management and Product Development
- Ensure incidents are well-documented, root causes are identified, and improvement actions are followed through
- Maintain and improve operational readiness standards (e.g. runbooks, dashboards and alerts, playbooks) in partnership with Service Operations
- Work closely with L1/L2 support teams to ensure effective triage capabilities and identify shift-left opportunities
- Identify patterns in incidents to drive backlog items, technical debt remediation, and platform hardening
- Drive backlog triage and remediation of technical debt arising from production issues
Delivery & Stakeholder Collaboration
- Collaborate with Product Management, Architecture and Product Development to ensure platform support and operational needs are factored into backlog refinement
- Collaborate with engineering, development, product, and architecture to scope, plan, and prioritise platform work
- Collaborate with QA and Product Development to validate changes, support test execution and unblock delivery
- Liaise with Service Operations to ensure L1/L2 support efficiency
- Report delivery risks to the Head of Architecture & Engineering
Required Qualification / Experience / Skills
- Experience building and operating performant and reliable systems at scale
- Experience coaching engineers in a service-oriented environment
- Strong troubleshooting and diagnostic skills in complex production environments
- Experience with monitoring and incident management tooling
- Demonstrated ability to deliver improvements in live support environments
- Familiarity with SLOs, alerting, runbooks, playbooks and observability tooling
- Comfortable operating with autonomy and owning technical outcomes
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence without direct authority
- Comfortable accepting and giving constructive, respectful feedback. Seeking and responding to that feedback often, delivering the right solution through quality-first implementation and collaboration
- Possessing an honest approach to sharing, and discussing, difficulties and alternative solutions
- A curious mind-set, always challenging yourself (and those around you!) to find better approaches
Languages & Frameworks
Messaging & Storage
- RabbitMQ or similar
- Elasticsearch or similar
- High Volume SQL Experience
- Platform Infrastructure
- Containerisation
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Cloud services utilisation (preferably AWS)
- Practices & Tools
- Git Source Control
- Unit & Automated Test Experience
Desired
- Practical experience with DDD (Domain Driven Design)
- Experience with GOLANG
- Knowledge of API Management Platforms
- Experience with Redis
- Experience with MongoDB
- Understanding of asynchronous programming frameworks (e.g. Celery, asyncio)
- Familiarity with ITSM principles or tooling (e.g., incident, problem, change management)
