Principal Platform Engineer

Looking for a job that fits your life, anywhere in the world? 🤔

Ever fancied a role where work molds around your life, no matter where around the globe you are? Welcome to Safeguard Global! We're all about making work fit into your world, wherever that may be.

About us:

At Safeguard Global, we're not your average company. Sure, we enable global expansion without the risk for over 1,500+ customers in nearly 190 countries, but what really makes us tick is giving you and 900+ Guardians the freedom to work in a way that suits your style, no matter the time zone in 50+ countries. 🌎

Our “work in any way” approach means you can call your couch your office or a café halfway across the world your boardroom, all while still having room to do school runs and essential errands throughout your working day. 🤩

What we're after:

• You are all about work flexibility and making things happen, whether in the heart of a bustling city or tucked away in the serene countryside. 🏞️
• You’re a team player with a knack for seamless communication, whether it's across the hallway or across continents. ✈️
  
  

How you will make a difference:

As our Principal Platform Engineer you will lead a team of Platform Engineers and collaborate across Engineering, Security, Architecture, Data, and Product to shape and deliver key platform outcomes. Treat internal engineers as users, build self-service workflows, and drive measurable improvements in speed, reliability, security, and efficiency.

Empower teams to leverage LLMs and AI-assisted tooling across the software delivery lifecycle, boosting throughput and quality while embedding security, privacy, auditability, and cost controls by default.

Platform strategy, roadmap and adoption:

• Lead and develop a team of Platform Engineers - hiring, coaching, performance support, technical direction, and delivery.
• Own the Internal Developer Platform roadmap and align priorities with Engineering leadership, Security, and Architecture.
• Build and maintain paved roads (golden paths) that standardise how teams deliver services (APIs, event consumers, scheduled jobs, data pipelines).
• Reduce developer friction by increasing self-service for common needs (service scaffolding, CI/CD, environments, secrets, access, observability).

Establish platform OKRs and measure outcomes (cycle time consistency, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR, developer satisfaction).

Delivery enablement and software supply chain:

• Improve CI/CD patterns and tooling (quality gates, progressive delivery, automated rollbacks, standard checks).
• Embed security and compliance into workflows using policy-as-code and secure defaults.
• Strengthen software supply chain controls (dependency scanning, SBOM/provenance, SAST/DAST, secret scanning, container/image scanning).
  
  

Reliability, operability and cost:

• Define and operationalise standards for observability (logs, metrics, traces), alerting, dashboards and runbooks.
• Partner with service teams to adopt SLIs/SLOs and error budgets in a way that supports both speed and reliability.
• Build scalable, resilient patterns into templates and reference implementations.
• Drive cost visibility and guardrails (FinOps) for platform components, shared services, and AI usage.
  
  

AI-assisted engineering enablement (LLMs):

• Enable teams to adopt AI-assisted workflows across the SDLC and run-the-line (for example: coding support, code review assistance, test generation, documentation, release readiness, incident support).

Provide approved patterns and tooling for safe usage (for example: internal knowledge search over documentation, runbook assistants, codebase Q&A, deployment helpers).

Implement guardrails and governance: access controls, audit logging, data boundaries, PII handling, evaluation and prompt/version management, and cost controls.

Measure adoption and impact and iterate based on evidence (productivity, quality, reliability and cost).

Cross-team influence:

• Partner closely with Security, Data Engineering and Architecture to ensure platform patterns align to enterprise controls (identity, access, auditability, data governance).
• Influence standards and migrations through enablement - docs, workshops, office hours, reference services, and migration playbooks.
  
  

What will give you an advantage:  

• Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams, including coaching and hiring.
• Strong background in distributed systems and cloud-native architecture, especially on AWS.
• Hands-on experience building developer platforms or self-service tooling.
• Deep knowledge of CI/CD, release engineering, and automated quality gates.

Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and environment automation.

Solid understanding of observability, reliability, and incident response practices.

Strong communication skills—able to influence and align stakeholders across levels.

Experience with modern service frameworks and Node.js/TypeScript platforms.

Familiarity with AWS-native infrastructure tooling like SST and event-driven architectures.

Knowledge of access control, identity integration, and fine-grained authorisation patterns.

Experience enabling governed data usage for analytics and AI, including privacy and compliance controls.

Practical experience with AI/LLM enablement, including governance, auditing, and cost management.

A product-minded approach—optimising platforms for adoption, usability, and measurable outcomes.

Track record of balancing high standards for security and reliability with pragmatic delivery.

Our Global Benefits 

• 👨‍💻 Autonomy and Flexibility (work in any way): Remote first, with the flexibility to include life needs like school runs and gym breaks in your schedule, all while maintaining a high standard of work.

🌴 Generous leave: Enjoy a competitive leave package including paid bonding leaves for new additions to your family   

🎁 Make a difference: Get 2 paid charitable days off to contribute to causes you believe in

💰 Corporate bonus/SIP: All Guardians are eligible for our annual bonus scheme or sales incentive plan. 

✈️ International environment: Grow your network internationally and collaborate across the world. Interact, discover cultures, and tap into local expertise.  

⭐ Human centered culture: We emphasize the people factor in everything we do. Our nurturing culture ensures your ideas reach our leaders and your contributions get the recognition they deserve.

📚 Learning: We support your continuous growth by providing access to 2 learning platforms, where you can learn at your own pace. 

 

Next Steps: 

Ready to join a workforce that shapes itself around your life, and embrace remote work like a pro? Apply by clicking on the following link. We wish you the best with your application. Our Guardian promise to you is to keep in touch to arrange the next stage should your application meet the position's requirements, or provide a gentle update if you have been unsuccessful at this time. 

Welcome to the future of work!

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At Safeguard Global, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and Guardians.