Lead Platform Engineer - Foundational Reliability

Overview

Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe! Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy. We’re a technology company focused on creating a smart, sustainable energy system. From optimising renewable generation, creating a more intelligent grid and enabling utilities to provide excellent customer experiences, our operating system for energy is transforming the industry around the world in a way that benefits everyone. It’s a really exciting time in energy. Help us make a real impact on shaping a better, more sustainable future. Our Global Platform Engineering Reliability group is responsible for architecting, developing, and maintaining the resilient and scalable infrastructure that powers and supports our platforms. As a Lead Platform Engineer in our Foundational Reliability team, you will improve reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence across customer-facing products operating at scale. This is a hybrid role combining technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and people management. You will own reliability outcomes end-to-end, lead a growing team, and influence platform-wide improvements across observability, governance, and service design.

What You\'ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Own the direction and outcomes of the Foundational Reliability team, working closely with Platform Engineering leadership to shape priorities, team direction, and delivery.
• Lead major reliability, scalability, and performance initiatives with clear ownership and measurable outcomes.
• Make architectural decisions for large-scale distributed systems and guide the team through complex technical challenges.
• Partner closely with Platform, Product, Engineering, and Solutions teams to drive cross-functional improvements, including observability standardisation and build and delivery improvements.
• Act as a bridge between technical squads and senior stakeholders, clearly communicating technical decisions and trade-offs.

People management

• Line-manage and develop engineers in a growing team, supporting mentoring, performance management, and career growth.
• Build a high-performing team culture grounded in accountability, technical excellence, and open communication.
• Set clear goals, provide regular feedback, and help the team create clarity and make strong decisions.

Technical delivery

• Remain hands-on through architecture reviews, code reviews, design discussions, and technical problem-solving.
• Drive improvements in reliability, availability, resilience, and performance for critical product systems.
• Support the rollout of platform-wide practices in monitoring, incident response, governance, and service design.
• Help define and evolve best practices for building and operating products at scale in AWS.

What You\'ll Have

• Strong technical depth in distributed systems and reliability engineering.
• Experience operating, improving, and troubleshooting large-scale, internet-facing production systems.
• A strong track record of owning and delivering critical projects at scale, with measurable impact.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers while remaining hands-on; you are comfortable combining technical leadership with line management.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Good experience with AWS cloud infrastructure; AWS is essential for this role.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language and strong backend engineering fundamentals; Python is preferred, but we are also open to Go or C-based language backgrounds.
• A proactive approach to identifying problems, driving change, and taking accountability for outcomes.

What Will Help

• Experience with observability, logging, monitoring, or incident response tooling and practices.
• Experience shaping platform standards, governance, or service reliability practices across engineering teams.
• Previous experience leading technical delivery in small, highly autonomous teams.
• Experience as a platform, backend, SRE, or infrastructure engineer in a product-focused environment.
• Experience working in a hybrid or distributed engineering team.

Familiarity with some of our tech stack

• AWS and cloud-native infrastructure
• Large Python code base
• Datadog, as our core observability tooling
• Docker and Kubernetes, including Amazon EKS
• PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, ideally on Amazon RDS at scale
• Messaging queues and event-driven asynchronous systems
• Terraform for infrastructure-as-code tooling

Kraken is a certified Great Place to Work in France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Australia. In the UK we are one of the Best Workplaces on Glassdoor with a score of 4.5 and in Germany we rate 4.7 on Kununu as a Top Company. Check out our Welcome to the Jungle site (FR/EN) to learn more about our teams and culture.

Are you ready for a career with us? We want to ensure you have all the tools and environment you need to unleash your potential. If you have any specific accommodations or a unique preference, please contact us at and we\'ll do what we can to customise your interview process for comfort and maximum magic!

Studies have shown that some groups of people, like women, are less likely to apply to a role unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whoever you are, if you like one of our jobs, we encourage you to apply as you might just be the candidate we hire. Across Kraken, we\'re looking for genuinely decent people who are honest and empathetic. Our people are our strongest asset and the unique skills and perspectives people bring to the team are the driving force of our success. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. We consider all applicants without regard to race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. U.S. based candidates can learn more about their EEO rights here.

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