Senior Software Development Engineer - Platform Engineer

Role Summary The Senior Software Engineer 1 is responsible for owning medium-complexity engineering initiatives that improve the automation, tooling, cloud infrastructure, and software delivery capabilities that enable Sophos engineering teams to build, test, and deliver cloud-based services reliably, securely, and at scale.

This is a hands-on engineering role requiring strong technical depth across platform engineering, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and developer tooling. The engineer is expected to lead work from design through production, make sound technical decisions with minimal guidance, improve engineering practices, and mentor less experienced engineers. Success in this role requires balancing software engineering fundamentals with operational excellence while collaborating across engineering, QA, product management, architecture, security, and release teams.

The ideal candidate is passionate about automation, operational reliability, and continuous improvement, communicates effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and leverages approved AI-assisted engineering tools responsibly to improve productivity, documentation, troubleshooting, and engineering quality.

What You Will Do

• Own the end-to-end delivery of medium-complexity platform engineering, DevOps, and CI/CD initiatives from design through production support.
• Design, implement, and improve developer platforms, release automation, and engineering workflows that increase reliability, scalability, and engineering productivity.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, and related tooling to support cloud-native software delivery.
• Drive improvements to Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) environments, deployment standards, operational readiness, and platform reliability.
• Design, provision, and maintain AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code with Terraform while leveraging Ansible, Packer, or similar automation frameworks where appropriate.
• Develop and maintain automation using Python, Groovy, and Bash to eliminate manual work, improve consistency, and simplify operational processes.
• Collaborate with software engineers, architects, QA, product management, security, and release stakeholders to translate business and engineering requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Troubleshoot complex build failures, deployment issues, infrastructure problems, Linux systems, cloud services, Kubernetes workloads, and application runtime behavior using logs, metrics, monitoring, and debugging tools.
• Design technical solutions that balance scalability, reliability, operational complexity, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Improve platform observability through logging, metrics, dashboards, monitoring, and alerting that reduce operational risk and improve service reliability.
• Champion secure engineering practices including secrets management, certificate lifecycle management, DevSecOps integrations, compliance tooling, and least-privilege access.
• Leverage approved AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development, scripting, troubleshooting, documentation, code reviews, and operational analysis while applying sound engineering judgment and adhering to security and privacy standards.
• Communicate technical designs, implementation plans, deployment status, risks, tradeoffs, dependencies, and operational readiness across engineering teams and stakeholders.
• Participate in operational support and on-call rotations, driving root-cause analysis and long-term improvements that reduce recurring operational issues.
• Mentor Software Engineers and early-career engineers through technical guidance, code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing while helping establish engineering best practices.

What You Will Bring The ideal candidate has extensive experience designing, building, and operating cloud-native platforms and developer tooling that enable reliable software delivery. This role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, deep Linux expertise, cloud infrastructure experience, excellent troubleshooting skills, and the ability to independently lead engineering initiatives while positively influencing team practices and technical direction.

• 5+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Release Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Software Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.
• Demonstrated ability to independently own medium-complexity engineering initiatives from design through implementation, validation, production readiness, and operational support.
• Strong experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines using GitHub, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Artifactory, or similar developer platforms.
• Strong working knowledge of AWS cloud services including IAM, EC2, EKS, VPC, S3, Route 53, CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, Load Balancers, and other cloud-native services. Azure experience is a plus.
• Strong hands-on experience supporting Kubernetes in production environments, with Amazon EKS experience strongly preferred.
• Strong experience with Docker and containerized application development, deployment, and runtime troubleshooting.
• Advanced Linux administration and troubleshooting skills, including shell scripting, process management, networking, system services, permissions, and performance analysis.
• Strong debugging and analytical skills with the ability to independently diagnose build failures, deployment issues, infrastructure problems, cloud services, and application runtime behavior.
• Strong programming and automation experience using Python and Groovy, with working knowledge of Bash scripting.
• Experience supporting Java/Spring Boot-based applications in production environments is preferred. The ability to troubleshoot application issues, understand application architecture, and collaborate with software development teams is more important than extensive application development experience.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining Infrastructure as Code using Terraform is a must. Experience with Ansible, Packer, Chef, or similar automation frameworks is highly desirable.
• Experience with release management practices including branching strategies, versioning, artifact promotion, progressive deployments, rollback planning, and release risk management.
• Experience administering GitHub repositories, developer workflows, artifact repositories, and engineering automation platforms.
• Familiarity with build tools such as Gradle, Maven, NPM, or equivalent tooling.
• Solid understanding of secrets management, SSL/TLS certificates, PKI concepts, least-privilege access, and secure automation practices.
• Experience integrating or operating DevSecOps tooling such as Black Duck, Prisma Cloud, Veracode, or similar security scanning platforms is preferred.
• Experience effectively using AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise to improve engineering productivity, automate repetitive tasks, accelerate troubleshooting, review code, summarize operational data, and generate technical documentation while exercising sound engineering judgment.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills with the ability to communicate technical concepts, architectural tradeoffs, operational risks, and engineering recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to identify recurring operational pain points, eliminate manual effort through automation, and continuously improve engineering efficiency, platform reliability, and developer experience.