Principal Platform Engineer

ISS STOXX is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to join our global Platform Engineering function, responsible for the cloud platforms, engineering capabilities, and operational foundations that support our products and services worldwide.

Working across both GCP and AWS, you will help shape the next evolution of our platform engineering capability. A key focus of the role will be extending and maturing our multi-cloud platform strategy, including the development of AWS landing zone capabilities that align with the standards, automation, governance, and developer experience established within our GCP platform.

Alongside this, you will play an important role in enabling the organisation's AI transformation. Building on our existing cloud platform foundations, you will help develop the tooling, patterns, operational capabilities, and platform services required to support AI-powered applications, agentic workflows, and emerging AI technologies at enterprise scale.

As a Principal Engineer, you will work closely with peers across engineering, architecture, security, and product teams to solve complex technical challenges and influence technical direction through expertise, collaboration, and delivery. You will evaluate emerging technologies, develop proof-of-concepts, and help translate promising ideas into practical, reusable capabilities that add value across the business.

We're looking for someone who combines deep platform engineering expertise with strong technical judgement, creativity, and curiosity. You should be equally comfortable designing cloud platforms, improving engineering practices, automating complex processes, and exploring how emerging technologies can be applied to solve real business problems.

You will thrive in a collaborative environment where success is achieved through influence rather than hierarchy, where platform engineering is viewed as an enabler for product teams, and where balancing innovation with operational excellence is fundamental to long-term success.

Responsibilities:

• Shape the architecture, evolution, and operational excellence of ISS STOXX's global cloud platforms across GCP and AWS, ensuring they remain secure, scalable, resilient, and easy for engineering teams to consume.

• Design, build, and mature AWS landing zone capabilities that align with the standards, governance, automation, security controls, and developer experience established with our GCP platform.

• Develop and enhance platform services, self-service capabilities, CI/CD tooling, observability solutions, and automation frameworks that improve developer productivity and operational effectiveness.

• Contribute to our AI transformation by building the platform capabilities, tooling, operational patterns, and guardrails required to support AI-powered applications, agentic workflows, and emerging AI technologies at enterprise scale.

• Act as a technical authority for complex platform engineering challenges, providing hands-on leadership during critical incidents and guiding the resolution of high-impact technical problems.

• Evaluate emerging technologies, develop proof-of-concepts, and translate successful innovations into practical, reusable platform capabilities that deliver measurable business value.

• Partner with engineering, architecture, security, and product teams to define technical direction, establish engineering standards, and ensure platform capabilities meet current and future business requirements.

• Drive continuous improvement across platform reliability, observability, automation, security, cost efficiency, and developer experience through data-driven engineering practices.

• Mentor and support engineers across the organisation, promoting platform engineering best practices, technical excellence, and a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

• Contribute to the long-term evolution of the Platform and AI Engineering functions, helping balance operational excellence with innovation while enabling teams to deliver value quickly and safely.

Requirements:

At least 10 years' experience in platform engineering, cloud engineering, or related disciplines, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale enterprise platforms.

• Strong experience designing and implementing cloud-native platforms and engineering capabilities on GCP and/or AWS.

• Experience building or maturing cloud landing zones, platform governance frameworks, and self-service developer platforms.

• Deep understanding of modern cloud architectures, including containers, Kubernetes, serverless technologies, APIs, networking, security, and identity management.

• Strong hands-on expertise with Infrastructure as Code, with master proficiency in Terraform.

• Experience developing and operating large-scale CI/CD, automation, and platform engineering capabilities that improve developer productivity and operational excellence.

• Experience evaluating emerging technologies, developing proof-of-concepts, and translating successful concepts into production-ready platform capabilities.

• Practical experience enabling AI and data-driven workloads on cloud platforms, including familiarity with the tooling, operational considerations, and governance requirements associated with modern AI solutions.

• Strong software engineering and automation skills, with expertise in Python and experience building reusable tooling and platform services.

• Experience with modern platform and engineering tooling such as GitHub Actions, Apigee, Airflow, and related cloud-native technologies.

• Expertise with observability platforms such as Data Dog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk or equivalent, including monitoring, logging, tracing, reliability engineering, and incident management.

• Sound technical judgement with the ability to balance innovation, risk, operational excellence, and business outcomes.

• Proven ability to influence technical direction, build consensus, and drive adoption of engineering best practices across multiple teams.

• Experience coaching and mentoring engineers, fostering technical excellence, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving.

• Experience working effectively within global, distributed, or multinational engineering organisations.

• Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• A pragmatic, outcome-focused approach with a passion for simplicity, automation, observability, and continuous improvement.

• Willingness to participate in out-of-hours support and major incident escalation when required.

Nice to have:

• Experience building platforms that support AI-powered applications, machine learning workloads, or agentic systems.

• Experience with GCP AI services, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model operations, or AI governance frameworks.

• Experience operating in multi-cloud environments and helping organisations establish consistent platform standards across cloud providers.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.