Senior Platform Engineer

Driftrock is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure and security that let our engineering teams ship fast, safely and at scale as more of the world's biggest car brands come on board.

Quick facts

Team: Engineering

Reports to: Head of Engineering

Location: Remote, UK or abroad, with a few hours of daily UK overlap

Contract: Full time, permanent

Salary: £65,000 to £85,000, plus share options

Start date: As soon as we find the right person

Why this role exists

Driftrock runs entirely on Google Cloud, and our product is growing quickly as more clients trust us with their marketing. As we scale, we're investing in a dedicated owner for our platform and security, so our engineering squads can keep shipping fast with strong foundations under them.

You'll define how we run, secure and evolve our platform, and build the tooling and secure defaults that let our product squads ship confidently without reinventing infrastructure every time. As Driftrock and our engineering org grow, this function is expected to grow too, and there's real room for the right person to shape it and eventually lead a small platform team.

Our platform is made of multiple Elixir services that talk to each other over APIs and RabbitMQ, store data in PostgreSQL and Redis, and run on Kubernetes (GKE) on Google Cloud. We manage our infrastructure in Terraform, run our own self-hosted Buildkite CI/CD, and use Oban for background jobs. We're a high-discipline engineering team that leans on Extreme Programming, test-driven development and pair programming to ship to production several times a day, with a strong data-driven and observability-first mindset.

What you'll own

You'll be accountable for the health, security and reliability of our cloud platform, and for the developer experience that sits on top of it, so that every engineer can build and ship with speed and confidence.

Your first 90 days

By day 30: you've mapped our current infrastructure, security posture and developer workflows, and you understand where the biggest opportunities and risks are.

By day 60: you've shipped your first improvements and shared a prioritised roadmap for the platform, agreed with the engineering team.

By day 90: you're delivering steadily against that roadmap, with early wins in place across security, reliability or developer experience, and clear ownership of the platform established.

What you'll be doing

Own and evolve our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud, shaping how it's structured, secured and scaled so product teams can ship with confidence.

Extend our infrastructure-as-code coverage so changes are repeatable, reviewable and safe, and our environments are cleanly separated.

Build on our identity, access and secrets management , maturing our existing least-privilege access and secret rotation as the platform scales.

Keep our security posture strong and audit-ready , maintaining our ISO 27001 certification and leading both certification and client security audits.

Own our Kubernetes platform end to end , keeping clusters and workloads current, reliable and easy for teams to use.

Own and improve our build and deployment pipelines on self-hosted Buildkite, along with the local tooling, containerisation and paved-road workflows that make our engineers faster.

Run a steady cadence of upgrades and patching across the platform, along with DNS and certificate management, keeping everything current with minimal disruption.

Improve infrastructure observability and visibility , so we understand cost, health and performance across our environments.

What you'll bring

Deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on a major cloud platform, ideally Google Cloud.

A track record of operating Kubernetes in production, from cluster operations to sensible workload patterns.

Fluency with infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform, and the instinct to codify everything.

Strong cloud security fundamentals across identity and access, secrets, and network security.

Experience owning CI/CD pipelines and improving how teams build and deploy.

Comfortable being hands-on in our codebase: you're happy to write some Elixir, for example standing up an Oban LiveView dashboard or building internal tooling, or you have a background in a functional language or Ruby and are genuinely keen to learn Elixir.

The seniority to own and shape a function: you set standards, make sound architecture decisions independently, and bring others with you.

An enablement-first mindset, building guard rails and paved roads rather than gates and bottlenecks.

Bonus points

Production experience with Elixir, Erlang/OTP, Phoenix or LiveView, or a background in Ruby.

Experience maintaining ISO 27001, SOC 2 or similar, and handling security audits with customers.

Reliability practices such as service-level objectives and incident management.

Awareness of cloud cost management.

Experience mentoring engineers or growing a small team.

Not sure you tick every box? Please…