Senior Platform Engineer

Driftrock is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure and security that let our engineering teams ship fast, safely and at scale as more of the world's biggest car brands come on board.

Quick facts

• Team: Engineering
• Reports to: Head of Engineering
• Location: Remote, UK or abroad, with a few hours of daily UK overlap
• Contract: Full time, permanent
• Salary: £65,000 to £85,000, plus share options
• Start date: As soon as we find the right person

Why this role exists

Driftrock runs entirely on Google Cloud, and our product is growing quickly as more clients trust us with their marketing. As we scale, we're investing in a dedicated owner for our platform and security, so our engineering squads can keep shipping fast with strong foundations under them.

You'll define how we run, secure and evolve our platform, and build the tooling and secure defaults that let our product squads ship confidently without reinventing infrastructure every time. As Driftrock and our engineering org grow, this function is expected to grow too, and there's real room for the right person to shape it and eventually lead a small platform team.

Our platform is made of multiple Elixir services that talk to each other over APIs and RabbitMQ, store data in PostgreSQL and Redis, and run on Kubernetes (GKE) on Google Cloud. We manage our infrastructure in Terraform, run our own self-hosted Buildkite CI/CD, and use Oban for background jobs. We're a high-discipline engineering team that leans on Extreme Programming, test-driven development and pair programming to ship to production several times a day, with a strong data-driven and observability-first mindset.

What you'll own

You'll be accountable for the health, security and reliability of our cloud platform, and for the developer experience that sits on top of it, so that every engineer can build and ship with speed and confidence.

Your first 90 days

• By day 30: you've mapped our current infrastructure, security posture and developer workflows, and you understand where the biggest opportunities and risks are.
• By day 60: you've shipped your first improvements and shared a prioritised roadmap for the platform, agreed with the engineering team.
• By day 90: you're delivering steadily against that roadmap, with early wins in place across security, reliability or developer experience, and clear ownership of the platform established.

What you'll be doing

• Own and evolve our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud, shaping how it's structured, secured and scaled so product teams can ship with confidence.
• Extend our infrastructure-as-code coverage so changes are repeatable, reviewable and safe, and our environments are cleanly separated.
• Build on our identity, access and secrets management, maturing our existing least-privilege access and secret rotation as the platform scales.
• Keep our security posture strong and audit-ready, maintaining our ISO 27001 certification and leading both certification and client security audits.
• Own our Kubernetes platform end to end, keeping clusters and workloads current, reliable and easy for teams to use.
• Own and improve our build and deployment pipelines on self-hosted Buildkite, along with the local tooling, containerisation and paved-road workflows that make our engineers faster.
• Run a steady cadence of upgrades and patching across the platform, along with DNS and certificate management, keeping everything current with minimal disruption.
• Improve infrastructure observability and visibility, so we understand cost, health and performance across our environments.

What you'll bring

• Deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on a major cloud platform, ideally Google Cloud.
• A track record of operating Kubernetes in production, from cluster operations to sensible workload patterns.
• Fluency with infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform, and the instinct to codify everything.
• Strong cloud security fundamentals across identity and access, secrets, and network security.
• Experience owning CI/CD pipelines and improving how teams build and deploy.
• Comfortable being hands-on in our codebase: you're happy to write some Elixir, for example standing up an Oban LiveView dashboard or building internal tooling, or you have a background in a functional language or Ruby and are genuinely keen to learn Elixir.
• The seniority to own and shape a function: you set standards, make sound architecture decisions independently, and bring others with you.
• An enablement-first mindset, building guard rails and paved roads rather than gates and bottlenecks.

Bonus points

• Production experience with Elixir, Erlang/OTP, Phoenix or LiveView, or a background in Ruby.
• Experience maintaining ISO 27001, SOC 2 or similar, and handling security audits with customers.
• Reliability practices such as service-level objectives and incident management.
• Awareness of cloud cost management.
• Experience mentoring engineers or growing a small team.

Not sure you tick every box? Please apply anyway.

Why Driftrock

Driftrock's mission is to become the world-leading automotive and e-mobility marketing software platform, and help accelerate the transition to clean transport.

We work with some of the world's biggest brands, including BMW, BYD, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, and partner with the world's leading platforms, including Meta, Google, mobile.de and Auto Trader.

We've been building since 2013, and our work enables billions of euros in vehicle sales every year.

We're a close, fully remote team of 35 people across engineering, design, customer success, performance and commercial, spread across the world.

That means your work has a real, visible impact on our product, our culture and how we operate.

We're at the cutting edge of marketing technology, with plenty of room to unlock value from data and to help speed up the shift to electric vehicles.

How we work is shaped by four values:

• We care: about our team, our customers, and the people who see the marketing messages that we power. Work isn't done until we can prove it's useful to both the consumer and the customer.
• Be that person: if something needs fixing, fix it. It's never someone else's problem.
• People-first: we put people at the core of everything, and never compromise security or privacy for results.
• Be better today than you were yesterday: we bake learning and continuous improvement into everything we do, for ourselves and our customers.

In practice, this looks like weekly Monday Showcases where we share what we're learning, regular retros, a budget to attend the courses and conferences that grow you, Donut coffee pairings to stay connected, and an annual company Summit that brings the whole global team together in person.

What's in it for you

We're remote-first and flexible about how and where you work, with co-working space available if you want it. Alongside your salary:

• Share options in Driftrock, on founder-friendly, tax-efficient EMI terms, including the option to retain vested options after leaving (at board discretion).
• Comprehensive Vitality health cover: medical, dental, vision, hearing, mental-health support and therapy, cancer cover, a free Headspace subscription and Vitality rewards.
• 24 to 28 days' holiday (24 + 1 extra each year, capped at 28), plus bank holidays.
• Pension contributions, life assurance (3x salary) and income protection.
• Electric car salary-sacrifice scheme (Octopus): save up to ~40%, with insurance, servicing and a charging perk included.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave.
• A learning budget for books, courses and conferences, plus time for personal goals.
• Perks and discounts via CharlieHR, and a BMW Group employee discount programme.

International team members:

We're remote-first and hire globally.While some UK-specific benefits are delivered differently abroad, we strive for genuine parity. Wherever you are, the standard package includes a comprehensive health plan, pension contributions, paid time off including local bank holidays, share options, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, a learning budget, and our flexible working culture. International team members are employed compliantly via an Employer of Record (Remote.com).

Our hiring process

1. A short intro call.
2. A conversation with the hiring manager.
3. A practical task based on real challenges, never unpaid spec work.
4. A final conversation with the team.

Inclusion at Driftrock

Driftrock is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background, identity and life experience, and we're building a team that reflects the people our marketing reaches. We don't make decisions based on age, disability, gender, gender identity, marital status, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, or sexual orientation. If you need any adjustments to the application or interview process to do your best, just let us know, and we're glad to help.

We will not be considering recruitment agencies for this role.

By applying for this job you give us permission to store your data on our secure applicant tracking system and to contact you about Driftrock job opportunities. We process your data for recruitment purposes only and keep it until this role is filled, after which we will delete it or, with your agreement, keep it for similar future roles for up to 12 months. See our privacy policy at driftrock.com/privacy-policy for how we comply with GDPR, including how to access, correct, delete or restrict the data we hold. You can lodge a complaint with the UK supervisory authority (the Information Commissioner's Office), or contact our DPO for any concerns.