Staff Platform Engineer (Azure, Kubernetes)

TL;DR

Staff Platform Engineer (Azure, Kubernetes): Build and evolve an internal developer platform with CI/CD, reliability tooling, and shared standards that help engineering teams ship change quickly, safely, and securely. Focus on platform direction, cost-optimised Azure cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes reliability at scale, and observability/SLOs with incident and problem management, including safe AI-assisted delivery using tools like Claude.

Location: Cardiff (Hybrid)

Company

Confused.com is a car insurance comparison site and part of the RVU group.

What you will do

• Set platform direction and drive adoption of shared, opinionated platform standards across engineering and product.
• Use logs, metrics, and cost data to decide what to build and measure whether changes improved outcomes.
• Own technical strategy and end-to-end delivery of the platform stack, including CI/CD and DevOps practices.
• Run and improve containerized systems at scale on Kubernetes (preferably AKS), designing for performance, scalability, and failure tolerance.
• Collaborate with multiple engineering teams to deliver self-service tooling (APIs/CLIs) that solves real internal problems.
• Mentor engineers and share learnings; set safe standards for AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude).

Requirements

• Leadership experience driving engineering and product teams to adopt shared platforms and standards (leadership role, not pure individual contribution).
• Proven experience building and operating highly available, scalable, consumer-facing systems in agile teams.
• Deep experience designing and running cost-optimised cloud platforms from scratch, preferably on Azure.
• Strong Kubernetes experience running containers at scale, ideally with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Strong observability practice for platform/cluster health and for shipped products, including SLOs, error budgets, alerting, and incident/problem management.
• Comfort with the full software development lifecycle (testing, version control, branching, deployment) and using AI development tools such as Claude safely.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working: 2 in-office days per week.
• “Work from anywhere” up to 22 working days per year.
• 10% discretionary yearly bonus and yearly pay reviews.
• Employer pension matching up to 7.5%.
• Private medical cover, critical illness cover, dental plans, and an employee assistance programme.
• Learning and training budget plus additional perks (gym access, discounts, EV/cycle-to-work scheme).

Hiring process

• Stage 1: Hired.
• Register interest to be notified of roles that match your criteria.