Oak Furnitureland is a beloved British furniture retailer with a passion for helping people create their dream homes. We are committed to exceptional quality and stylish furniture at accessible prices. As we continue to grow and evolve, we are building an AI-native engineering team to modernise the large, established platform behind our ecommerce site and internal systems. We are seeking a talented Platform Engineer to join our engineering team in our head office in Swindon. We can offer hybrid working with 2 days a week in the office and 3 days working from home.
The Platform Engineer will design, build, run and continually improve the cloud platform, build pipelines and tooling that our website, our in-house ERP application (Acorn) and our data services depend on.
This role is ideal for a hands-on engineer who enjoys making other engineers more productive. You will own the reliability, security and cost of our AWS-based platform, automate as much as possible through Infrastructure as Code, and work closely with our developers to give them a fast, safe and consistent path from code to production.
Key responsibilities:
Cloud Platform & Infrastructure:
•Design, deploy and manage AWS infrastructure across multiple regions, including EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, Route 53 and load balancing.
•Operate and support our Aurora MySQL estate, including Global Database replication, backups, patching and failover testing.
•Maintain hybrid connectivity between AWS and our offices, including site-to-site VPNs and routing.
Infrastructure as Code & Configuration Management:
•Define and manage infrastructure as code using tools such as Terraform.
•Build and maintain machine images and server configuration using Packer and SaltStack.
•Keep environments consistent, repeatable and version-controlled.
CI/CD & Developer Enablement:
•Build, maintain and improve build and deployment pipelines for our applications and website, integrated with Bitbucket and Jira.
•Provide self-service tooling, templates and documentation so developers can ship quickly and safely.
•Support the scheduling and reliability of back-office jobs and integrations with third-party services.
Monitoring, Reliability & Incident Response:
•Implement and maintain monitoring, logging and alerting using AWS CloudWatch, New Relic and related tools.
•Take part in incident response, carry out root cause analysis and drive fixes that stop issues recurring.
•Plan for capacity, resilience and disaster recovery.
Security & Compliance:
•Apply security best practice across the platform, including least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, secrets management and patching.
•Support compliance requirements such as PCI DSS and UK GDPR.
Data Platform Support:
•Help build and operate our data platform on AWS (S3, Athena, Glue and related services) that supports reporting, BI and AI initiatives.
AI Platform Support:
•Help build and operate our AI platform.
Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud (Secondary):
•Provide occasional support for our Microsoft Entra ID directory, such as user and group administration, app registrations and access policies.
•Look after a small number of Azure virtual machines and services alongside the main AWS platform.
•Where appropriate, help manage selected services in Google Cloud.
Cost Optimisation:
•Monitor cloud spend and identify savings through right-sizing, reserved capacity and removing unused resources.
Documentation:
•Create and maintain clear documentation for platform architecture, runbooks and operational procedures.
Continuous Improvement:
•Evaluate new AWS services, tools and practices, and recommend improvements to the platform.
•Share knowledge with the wider team and mentor less experienced engineers.
Skills & experience:
•Previous experience in a platform, DevOps or cloud engineering role.
•Proven experience running production workloads on AWS.
•Experience supporting web applications and relational databases in production.
•Strong working knowledge of core AWS services (EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, RDS/Aurora, CloudWatch).
•Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CloudFormation).•Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
•Confident Linux administration and scripting skills.
•Good understanding of networking fundamentals, including DNS, TCP/IP, routing, load balancing and VPNs.
•Experience with version control using Git.
•Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
•Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical topics to non-technical colleagues.
•A collaborative approach and a focus on enabling others.
•Ownership of work from start to finish, with attention to detail and a methodical approach.
Desireable:
•AWS Solutions Architect - Associate, SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer - Professional certification.
•Experience with configuration management tools, particularly SaltStack, and image building with Packer.
•Experience supporting PHP applications and MySQL at scale.
•Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (e.g. Docker or ECS).
•Exposure to AWS data services such as Athena, Glue and Apache Iceberg.
•Experience with Atlassian tools (Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence).
•Experience working in e-commerce or retail.
Benefits:
- Employee discount: amazing discounts available on all Oak Furnitureland products after successful completion of probation
- 25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
- Birthday: an additional day off for you to celebrate your birthday
- Pension: 4% employee contribution matched by the company
- Group Income Protection (GIP) - Cover in the event that you are unable to work due to an accident or long-term illness
- Group Life Insurance (GDIS) - The Company provides Life Insurance cover of three times your basic salary
- Employee Assistance Programme: gives all employees access to both telephone and face-to-face counselling services
- My Rewards Programme: offers discounts on everything from restaurants and supermarkets, to entertainment and holidays
- Free onsite parking