Senior Platform Engineer

Hi 👋 we’re Genio. We create beautifully simple learning tools that boost knowledge, skills, and confidence.

• We’re a SaaS scale up and one of the fastest growing tech companies in the North.
• There’s 90+ of us around the UK with our HQ in Leeds.
• Our software is award-winning and used by 100,000s of students at over 1,000 universities & colleges worldwide.
• We’re growing so we can achieve our mission to support 1 million students to become better learners by 2030.

🚀 About the role

Career track: IC4

Unit: Shared services

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you help set the strategy for Genio's infrastructure end-to-end — from design through to running it in production. You work with squads on feature work to advise/set direction, and ensure reliability, security, and cost efficiency. You drive the design and implementation of best-practice cloud infrastructure, automation frameworks, and tooling that enable scalability, reliability, and efficiency for engineering teams in both business units. Working closely with engineers, testers, and data colleagues, you lead initiatives to enhance platform capabilities, optimise performance, and champion DevOps principles.

Responsibilities:

• Evolving Genio's cloud infrastructure: Architect and optimise cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability, security, and resilience. Shape long-term infrastructure strategy and apply Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD best practices.
• Maintaining and improving observability of Genio's applications: Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing capabilities. Champion the adoption of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs.
• Leading incidents and post-incident learning: Support as an incident lead for PlatformOps, coordinate the response, run blameless post-incident reviews, and track actions to completion.
• Driving automation of repetitive tasks: Develop scalable automation frameworks to streamline engineering workflows and improve efficiency.
• Raising the technical capability of other teams: Act as a technical advisor, provide guidance and upskilling support for platform tooling, and mentor engineers across engineering teams.

👥 Meet the team

You will report to the Principal Platform Engineer and work most closely with:

• Principal Platform Engineer (Operations)
• Platform Engineer (Operations)
• Engineering teams in both business units
• Production Support Engineer (Operations)
• Senior Data Engineer (Operations)

👤About you:

Essential:

• Systems design and judgement: Takes an ambiguous problem, defines options, makes trade-offs explicit, and writes clear design documents.
• Programming Skills: Strong experience in scripting and programming with Python and/or Bash for automation and tooling.
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficient with Terraform for infrastructure automation.
• Cloud Platforms: Strong experience with AWS or Google Cloud.
• Kubernetes in production: Experience operating, upgrading, networking, and debugging Kubernetes clusters under load.
• Reliability Engineering & Security: Proven ownership of production service reliability (defining SLIs, incident response) and implementing security practices (access control, secrets management, patching, backup/recovery).

Bonus / Nice to have: 

• AI-Assisted Development: Comfortable and proficient with AI development tools as part of everyday engineering.
• Cost Awareness: Understanding of infrastructure costs and the ability to build cases for spending changes.
• Collaboration & Adaptability: Ability to mentor others, foster trust, make pragmatic technology choices, and communicate with "passionate views, loosely held".

💰Salary and benefits:

💸£70,000- £76,000 per annum dependent on experience 

🏖️ 33 days annual leave (Inclusive of bank holidays)

🎄 3 gifted days off at Christmas

💰 EMI Share Options Scheme

🎓 Generous individual learning and training allowance

⌚ Truly flexible hours to suit when you work best

💻 Full home working set up and beautiful collaborative office space

🚗 Free Leeds City Centre office parking

🌴 Nomad working policy with family travel insurance

🍼 Enhanced 26 weeks maternity and 4 weeks paternity (fully paid)

🤍 Health cash plan (from glasses to massages)

💸 6% employer pension contribution

📍Location: 

Our beautiful office space in Leeds is our key hub for collaboration, and we love to get together in person. We operate a flexible hybrid working model, including supporting our Genios who are based remotely across the UK. If you are more than 50 miles away from the office, we offer full remote working support within the UK, with the opportunity to join colleagues for in-person collaboration several times a year.

We will discuss ways of working with you at interview however if you have any questions before you apply please reach out to  

💡 What to expect next: 

We’ll review your application and provide a response within 1 week. Even if it’s not the news you’d hoped for, we appreciate it’s good to know either way.

If we invite you to meet with us for interview, here’s an overview of what the process will look like:

1. Screening interview with our Recruitment Business Partner
2. A take-home technical test for you to complete offline and submit back to us 
3. A technical interview with Mark, Staff Platform Engineer and an Engineer from the Platform Operations team
4. A CV review and Cultural & Values interview with Mark and our Head of Engineering, Mala

Ahead of your interview you will receive a confirmation email outlining who you’ll be meeting and when, anything you’ll need to prepare in advance and any resources we think you might find helpful. 

👀 Interested in learning more about a career at Genio? 

Here are a few further resources:

About Genio

Life at Genio

Case studies and user stories

💌 Not quite the right role for you however you’d love to be a part of Genio’s journey? 

Let’s connect! Reach out to

📄 Applicant Privacy Notice 

We think it’s important that you understand how we use and handle your personal information, so here’s a link to our privacy notice. By submitting your application, you’re confirming that you’ve read and understood this notice.