Platform Engineer

McLaren Applied; Woking; Hybrid; GBP 40,000 - 80,000

Job description

Background

The world around us is experiencing significant change, the greatest in generations.

At McLaren Applied, we’re accelerating the response to that change. Our vision is that our people and technologies will pioneer a better future. Our mission is to achieve breakthroughs in performance.

We’re at the cutting edge of innovation in industries including transportation and motorsport. We create solutions that drive efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

We want to help to reduce the carbon footprint and become more sustainable.

This role is in the Connected Intelligence Business unit. Our products have been developed from Formula One technology to provide connectivity services and analytics to a range of customers, primarily in Transportation, but also in Industrial and Motorsport environments.

By applying our expertise, we deliver real benefits and pioneer a better future.

Driving Engineering Excellence

This isn’t just about writing great code; it’s about advocating practices that push high quality engineering. You’ll be in a team reflecting on what went well and what they could have done better and turn those into learning actions. You will take pride in the solutions you and your team develop.

You’ll be passionate about learning and continuous improvement, both for yourself and for your team. When you learn something new you will want to share it with others. You’ll organise and encourage learning opportunities for you and others and will actively advocate the growth of the knowledge of those around you.

Purpose of the Role

You will be one of our key contributors who guide and foster innovation by developing the platform for our leading-edge products that span various market segments including Transportation, Automotive, Motorsport and Industrial.

You will work collaboratively to solve interesting and challenging problems in a cross functional team with other engineering disciplines including Data Scientists, Simulation Engineers, Software Engineers, Test Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Systems Engineers and Hardware Engineers.

The cloud platform team is missioned to build secure, compliant and standardised infrastructure as well as internal developer platforms to enhance operational efficiency and enable faster and reliable software delivery. In this team you'll have a unique opportunity to have first-hand exposure to the strategy of the company in key platform initiatives, especially in building scalable and secure-by-design systems and solutions.

You also have opportunities to go through the whole lifecycle of platform products or services, are encouraged to participate in each phase, each part of the projects and have the whole picture of what you are working on.

Principal Accountabilities

As a Platform Engineer who is passionate about technology, you will use the most effective and applicable technologies to create and improve the McLaren Applied ‘Cloud Platform as a Service’ offering to the product delivery teams.

You will lead on implementation of the McLaren Applied security governance policy across our products and platform, being a key participant in maintaining and updating the policy in accordance with technology shifts, customer feedback and product development feedback.

You will develop and maintain reusable software components for a combination of off-the-shelf and bespoke hardware ranging from cloud-based servers to resource-constrained embedded units all running customized Linux environments.

You will learn how to leverage existing open-source software to extend our capabilities, integrating and tailoring software to suit customers’ needs, through clean and consistent coding.

You will champion architectural and technical good practice across the software development teams, from initiation through the whole product lifecycle.

Location

This role is based at our head office in central Woking. The role is included in our hybrid working policy with the expectation of a minimum of three days a week in the office, which should be co-ordinated with other members of the Engineering team.

Basic Qualifications

We are looking for an applicant who has:

1. Bachelor's degree in computer science, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
2. 3+ years of hands on experience with large cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI.
3. Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Ansible, or SaltStack.
4. 3+ years of hands on experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
5. Excellent programming, debugging, and optimization skills in general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: Go, Python, C/C++, Java, or Rust.
6. Solid understanding of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines and version control e.g. Git.
7. Interest and ability to learn other coding languages as needed
8. Knowledge of observability and monitoring tools e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK etc
9. Experience in troubleshooting incidents and live environments.
10. Ability to write and speak in English fluently

Desirable & Development Areas

Some of the below would be beneficial to the applicant, but opportunities to develop in these areas will also be provided:

1. Experienced working in and developing for a Linux environment
2. Knowledge in cyber security, including but not limited to threat intelligence, IAM, key management systems, data security, application security, applied cryptography, certificate management.
3. Experience of IoT systems integration, protocols, and services, including gRPC and MQTT
4. Networking concepts and network performance modelling / optimisation
5. Experience with security and compliance frameworks e.g. SOC 2, ISO 270001 etc.
6. Experience with Hashicorp tools like Vault or Consul

Benefits Include

1. Annual leave (25 days + bank holidays, pro-rated for part time colleagues).
2. Enhanced Company Maternity, Paternity and Adoption leave and pay.
3. Flexible working policies, including Hybrid Working.
4. Life assurance to the value of 4 times base salary
5. Opportunity to join the McLaren Applied Pension Plan
6. Company funded individual private healthcare with the opportunity to extend to partner or spouse and/or dependents at a discounted rate.
7. Ride-to-work with Evans Cycles – take advantage of the Government’s Cycle-to-Work scheme which offers savings of up to 42% on the cost of a new bike, cycling accessories and components.
8. Electric car scheme – opportunity to drive a brand-new car in a more affordable way through this salary sacrifice scheme. Employees are eligible to join the scheme after successful completion of their probationary period.

Who we are

McLaren Applied are a medium-sized tech firm spun out of McLaren Group. We’re looking for people who will thrive in a non-hierarchical, growth-orientated company, self-starters who are flexible and somewhat entrepreneurial in their approach.

McLaren Applied are committed to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) and promote DEI in all we do. McLaren Applied are also members of the UK Government Disability Confident Scheme.