Lead Platform Engineer

Own the Azure platform behind the UK's largest holiday park operator - AKS, Azure DevOps, IaC and observability across five squads and four environments, serving millions of customers a year.

WHO WE ARE

Parkdean Resorts is the UK's largest holiday park operator. Every year, families across the UK choose Parkdean for their holidays, and every one of those experiences depends, somewhere down the line, on our technology working properly. As we've grown, parts of our platform and cloud estate haven't kept pace, which means inconsistency in environments, pipelines, and release confidence. We have the strategy, the leadership backing, and the plan to fix that. What we need now is the right person to own it.

THE ROLE

What you build here will be felt across every squad in the business, and ultimately by every customer who books a holiday with us.

You'll own the application cloud infrastructure and the engineering platform that runs on top of it: AKS cluster management, Azure resource architecture, environment provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, observability, IaC. One remit, not two separate jobs bolted together.

You'll lead the cloud and platform function, with line management responsibility for our Platform Engineer and full ownership of how platform engineering works at Parkdean.

This is application and platform infrastructure, not corporate IT, networking, or end-user estate. Our Infrastructure team owns the network and perimeter layer. Everything required to build, deploy, and operate applications is yours. A key part of the role is making sure it's adopted and valued by the teams who use it, not just built and handed over.

You'll have the backing of engineering leadership and a genuine mandate to improve things steadily and pragmatically. This is a role for someone who wants to shape something, not just maintain it.

WHAT YOU'LL BUILD

A delivery pipeline engineering teams can rely on, where releases are routine rather than something to dread

• CI/CD across Azure DevOps, designed and owned rather than just configured.
• Quality gates and branch policies enforced by tooling, with static code analysis at PR level.
• Full release traceability: every commit linked to a ticket linked to a release.

Environments teams can trust, consistent and stable

• Enforced promotion paths across all squads.
• IaC-driven provisioning with Terraform.

Full visibility in production, so problems are caught by the team rather than reported by the business

• App Insights, Log Analytics, monitoring and alerting as standard.
• Secrets management via Key Vault, managed identities, and RBAC.
• Security tooling integrated into the pipeline alongside our Security team.

A cloud platform built to scale, one that grows with Parkdean without creating new problems as it does

• AKS cluster management and container platform operations.
• Azure subscriptions, resource groups, storage, and data services.
• Cost visibility, DORA baselines, and an engineering metrics dashboard the whole org can see.

THE STACK

Essential:

• Azure: AKS (Kubernetes), App Insights, Log Analytics, Key Vault, managed identities, service principals.
• Azure DevOps, with CI/CD pipeline design and ownership.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform.
• Observability: application monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Security: secrets management, RBAC, application-level IAM.
• Engineering metrics: DORA, release traceability, change failure rate, MTTR.

Desirable:

• Static analysis tooling such as SonarCloud or equivalent.
• Test automation pipelines (Cypress, Selenium, or Playwright).
• Sitecore CMS or e-commerce platform infrastructure.
• SQL Server in Azure.
• FinOps and Azure cost optimisation.

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU

Deep, hands-on Azure experience across both infrastructure and platform layers. Proven Kubernetes ownership in production. CI/CD pipeline design and evolution, not just configuration. Someone who doesn't draw a hard line between infrastructure and platform work, because in this role, there isn't one.

This role is best suited to engineers who have already owned platform or cloud environments used by multiple teams in production.

If you're the kind of engineer who sees this as exactly the role worth moving for, with real ownership, real impact, and the backing to make it happen, we'd like to hear from you.

So, why Parkdean Resorts?

Well, besides the one-of-a-kind team culture, stunning locations across the UK, and the chance to work with the UK's largest holiday park organisation, we can offer:

• You're never on your own with our Employee Assistance Programme! It comes with a 24/7 confidential helpline for counselling and support - because your wellbeing is our top priority.
• A 50% discount for you and a 25% discount for friends and family when booking your holiday with us.
• A team member discount of 30%, available on everything from fabulous food to delicious drinks and even our fun leisure activities.
• Score awesome discounts! From tasty meal kits like Hello Fresh to your favourite local gyms, we've got deals on lots of brands just for you.

We want to be a force for good and caring for our parks, people, and planet is a natural component of the way we do business. We celebrate our people, communities and natural environment, enabling us to enhance the amazing memories we create for many years to come.

Are we the right fit for you?

At Parkdean Resorts, every park is a place to start something great; a place where you can develop your skills, take on new challenges, and thrive alongside a team that supports you every step of the way.

Our parks create meaningful memories for our guests and know that great service is more than a smile - it's understanding the value of every moment. Because it's not just what we do, it's who we are. Join a team that puts heart into every holiday. Be the Heart of the Park.

Parkdean Resorts takes safeguarding seriously therefore background checks including DBS (or equivalent) will be carried out if appropriate.

We want to do all we can to create an environment and recruitment process where people feel safe and comfortable to talk about disability. For any reasonable adjustment requests as part of the recruitment and assessment process, please contact Roisin at reasonable.adjuctments@parkdean-resorts.com.