Platform Engineer

At AJ Bell, we're reshaping engineering practices by creating integrated internal platforms and toolsets designed to streamline and enhance the engineering experience. Our Platform Engineering Team, which is central to our operations, works across multiple product engineering and specialist teams. We build intuitive platforms and tools so our product engineers can focus on our customers, fostering a developer-centric environment that enables high-quality, secure, and rapid software delivery.

As a Platform Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in our mission, collaborating with diverse product engineering teams and working on a broad range of tasks that vary day-to-day. We work in a dynamic, fast-paced setting, continually aiming to stay ahead of the technology curve, and the landscape is always changing, leading to exciting achievements and growth opportunities.

We pride ourselves on our commitment to fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment. As a member of our team, you will contribute to these ongoing efforts and play an integral part in our future successes.

Responsibilities:

• Manage, maintain and extend the Backstage Internal Developer Platform.
• Manage, maintain and extend our Internal Engineering Data Platform.
• Refine and enhance the developer experience and CI/CD processes across multiple build tools.
• Develop and maintain integration APIs for our platforms and toolsets.
• Create and promote templates for self-service capabilities.
• Incorporate application security into developer workflows.
• Build monitoring and observability solutions.
• Leverage engineering data to drive insights and improvements.
• Foster collaboration across the organisation and reduce organisational silos while maintaining engineering autonomy.

Valuable Skills and Experience:

• Previous experience in a Platform Engineering role, or as a Software Developer with a keen interest in improving developer workflows and experiences.
• Familiarity with modern development practices and workflows.
• Understanding of CI/CD practices, including integrating security tools.
• Experience applying automation to the build, test, deploy, and release workflows.
• Proficiency in one or more development languages such as Typescript, Go, Dotnet, and various scripting languages.
• Some experience with Internal Developer Platforms, such as Backstage
• A good understanding of software tooling, cloud computing, containerisation, and serverless infrastructure
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code tooling and infrastructure templating
• Effective problem-solving, analytical, and collaboration skills.
• Some experience working in an experimentation led environment

While we've listed many skills, we do not expect you to possess all of these. If you resonate with our mission and have a passion for developer workflows and experience, but don't meet all the requirements, we still encourage you to apply.

Our Stack:

We treat our platform and toolsets as products, following the same engineering workflows that we support for our product engineering teams. Our Internal Developer Platform is built with Backstage, Node, and Typescript. Our APIs are built with Go, and all are hosted on AWS serverless environments with accompanying infrastructure as code.

The product engineering teams we support use a variety of technologies, including Node, Go, and .NET.

About Us:

AJ Bell is one of the fastest-growing investment platform businesses in the UK offering an award-winning range of solutions that caters for everyone, from professional financial advisers, to DIY investors with little to no experience. We have over 491,000 customers using our award-winning platform propositions to manage assets totalling more than £76.1 billion. Our customers trust us with their investments, and by continuously striving to make investing easier, we aim to help even more people take control of their financial futures.

Having listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange in December 2018, AJ Bell is now a FTSE 250 company.

Headquartered in Manchester with offices in central London and Bristol, we now have over 1300 employees and have been named one of the UK's 'Best 100 Companies to Work For’ for six consecutive years.

There are opportunities for growth and professional development for employees wanting to progress within their career including induction training and our study support scheme which is part of our benefits package.

There is an active programme of social events throughout the year, which are open to all employees.

In return for your hard work you will be entitled to:

• Starting salary up to £65,000 (DOE)
• Generous holiday allowance of 25 days, increasing up to 31 days with service, plus bank holidays
• Holiday buy/sell scheme
• Hybrid working policy
• Casual dress code
• Discretionary bi-annual bonus
• Contributory pension scheme
• Buy as you earn share scheme
• Free shares scheme
• Paid study support for qualifications
• Enhanced maternity/paternity scheme from day one
• Bike loan
• Season ticket loan portal
• Discounted PMI and Dental
• On-site gym and personal trainer led classes
• Paid volunteering opportunities
• Free social events and more

AJ Bell is committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and all employees are empowered to bring their whole self to work.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, pregnancy, religion, physical and mental disability, marital status and any other characteristics protected by the Equality Act 2010. All decisions to hire are based on qualifications, merit and business need.