Principal Platform Software Engineer - AI & Cloud Platform

You will partner closely with product management, customer engineering teams, and OCI engineers to translate evolving requirements into secure, scalable, and reliable software. The successful candidate is comfortable working through ambiguity, iterating quickly based on customer feedback, and balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform quality.

This role follows a hybrid working model, with an expectation to work from our Reading or London office as required.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Software Development

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and operate cloud-native platform services supporting AI, data, IoT, and enterprise cloud workloads.
• Drive the evolution of reusable platform capabilities by transforming customer-specific functionality into configurable OCI services.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that improve scalability, resilience, interoperability, security, and operational excellence across distributed systems.
• Implement cloud-native automation for provisioning, deployment, configuration, upgrades, rollback, and lifecycle management using CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Develop observability capabilities including telemetry, metrics, dashboards, alerts, logging, tracing, and health monitoring to ensure reliable production operations.

Software Development and Coding – Design, Testing, and Optimization

• Designs software solutions and analyzes technical requirements to deliver scalable cloud platform capabilities aligned with customer and business needs.
• Contributes throughout all phases of the software development lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.
• Develops production-quality software for distributed systems, APIs, service integrations, automation workflows, and data-processing pipelines.
• Implements reusable, maintainable, and secure software components that support AI, cloud, and enterprise platform services.
• Conducts code reviews and contributes to engineering standards, documentation, and best practices.
• Diagnoses and resolves complex production issues through debugging, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Implements comprehensive testing strategies including unit, integration, performance, load, and resilience testing.
• Optimizes application performance, scalability, and operational efficiency through profiling, monitoring, and continuous improvements.
• Develops and maintains APIs, ensuring secure integration, compatibility, and lifecycle management.

Software Architecture – Software System Structural Design

• Contributes to the design and implementation of scalable, resilient, and highly available distributed systems.
• Participates in architecture reviews and recommends practical design improvements supporting elasticity, fault tolerance, and operational readiness.
• Collaborates with senior engineers, product managers, and technical stakeholders to ensure architectural alignment across services.
• Evaluates technical approaches that improve cloud infrastructure, AI platform capabilities, service interoperability, and long-term maintainability.
• Implements performance optimization, security, and scalability considerations throughout software design.

Customer-Focused Delivery

• Collaborates closely with product management, customer-facing teams, and engineering partners to understand technical requirements and business objectives.
• Translates customer workflows and feedback into reusable platform capabilities and production-ready features.
• Balances rapid customer delivery with long-term platform strategy and reusable service design.
• Provides technical recommendations that improve customer outcomes while maintaining engineering quality and platform consistency.

Reliability & Operations – Software Products Support

• Builds telemetry, monitoring, alerting, diagnostics, and operational dashboards for cloud services.
• Investigates production incidents, participates in incident response, and performs root-cause analysis to improve service reliability.
• Implements automation, operational runbooks, capacity planning, and service health improvements.
• Participates in operational support rotations and contributes to maintaining service availability, reliability, and performance objectives.
• Collaborates with engineering and operations teams to resolve customer-impacting issues and improve operational processes.

Practices and Standards Compliance – Security and Compliance

• Applies secure engineering practices throughout the software development lifecycle, including authentication, authorization, encryption, secure data handling, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Follows established engineering standards, release management processes, and secure coding guidelines.
• Participates in peer reviews and contributes to improving engineering quality, software reliability, and development practices.
• Promotes cloud security best practices and operational governance across platform services.

Development Operations – System Maintenance

• Builds and maintains deployment pipelines, infrastructure automation, and operational tooling supporting cloud services.
• Performs system maintenance activities including upgrades, patching, configuration management, and release validation.
• Improves operational efficiency through automation, continuous deployment, monitoring, and proactive maintenance practices.
• Contributes to service health, reliability, and operational readiness through continuous improvement initiatives.

Core Responsibilities

Planning & Execution

• Owns moderately complex software components or platform capabilities from technical design through production deployment and ongoing operation.
• Plans, prioritizes, and delivers engineering work across multiple initiatives while adapting to changing priorities and evolving customer requirements.
• Coordinates implementation activities to ensure timely delivery, operational readiness, and engineering quality.

Collaboration & Partnership

• Works collaboratively across product management, engineering, security, operations, and customer teams to deliver high-quality cloud platform solutions.
• Partners with stakeholders to validate requirements, refine priorities, and align technical solutions with customer and business objectives.
• Contributes to an inclusive engineering culture by actively sharing knowledge, encouraging collaboration, and valuing diverse technical perspectives.

Problem Solving

• Analyzes complex technical challenges involving distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, or production services.
• Applies sound engineering judgment to resolve ambiguous technical problems while balancing customer needs, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Escalates significant risks appropriately and contributes practical recommendations for long-term improvements.

Continuous Learning

• Maintains expertise in cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, Kubernetes, observability, infrastructure automation, and modern software engineering practices
• Seeks opportunities to expand technical knowledge through new technologies, customer engagements, and engineering best practices.
• Mentors less experienced engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and technical guidance.

Continuous Improvement

• Identifies opportunities to improve engineering processes, development workflows, automation, operational excellence, and service reliability.
• Contributes to improving engineering standards, reusable platform capabilities, testing strategies, and deployment practices.
• Leverages customer feedback and operational insights to continuously improve platform capabilities.

Performance and Development

• Contributes to engineering excellence through technical mentorship, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and code reviews.
• Participates in candidate interviews, provides technical assessments, and contributes hiring recommendations to strengthen the engineering organization.

Career Level - IC4