Senior Platform Automation Engineer
Location: Stoke-on‑Trent, Permanent Onsite
Salary: £75,000- £85,000 (DOE) + benefits
The Senior Platform Automation Engineer is responsible for designing, delivering, and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) that underpins the secure, repeatable, and compliant delivery of Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) for defence customers and their supply‑chain partners. The purpose of this role is to reduce manual infrastructure build and configuration, improve consistency and reliability, and enable rapid, auditable deployment of environments that meet defence‑grade security and assurance standards. The role plays a critical part in ensuring CWEs can be provisioned, evolved, and operated safely through code‑driven automation.
Working within secure, predominantly on‑premise and private cloud platforms, the Senior Platform Automation Engineer contributes hands‑on engineering expertise while promoting automation best practices, supporting platform resilience, and enabling delivery teams to consume infrastructure safely and efficiently.
Strategic & Principal Responsibilities
- Contribute to the strategic direction for on‑premise platform automation
- Define automation standards, patterns, and reference architectures for secure on‑premise infrastructure.
- Shape the long‑term roadmap for Infrastructure as Code adoption, modernising traditional infrastructure practices safely within defence environments.
- Act as a technical authority and decision maker for platform automation approaches, tools, and designs.
- Influence senior stakeholders, architects, security teams, and delivery leads on platform strategy, risk, and investment priorities.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation Delivery
- Design, build, and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for the automated provisioning and lifecycle management of on‑premise CWEs.
- Develop reusable, version‑controlled automation artefacts to standardise infrastructure builds across environments.
- Lead the transition from manual and bespoke builds to repeatable, code‑driven infrastructure delivery.
- Ensure all infrastructure changes are auditable, reproducible, and aligned with secure delivery practices.
Security, Assurance & Compliance
- Embed defence‑grade security controls, identity integration, and configuration hardening into all automation.
- Design infrastructure automation to support accreditation, assurance, and audit requirements.
- Work closely with security and compliance teams to ensure platforms meet customer and regulatory expectations.
CI/CD & Environment Lifecycle Management
- Integrate Infrastructure as Code into CI/CD pipelines to support controlled, repeatable platform changes.
- Define and implement safe promotion models across development, test, and production environments.
- Automate environment provisioning, modification, and decommissioning to support customer lifecycle needs.
Operational Reliability & Continuous Improvement
- Improve reliability and reduce operational risk by identifying automation gaps and replacing manual processes.
- Support incident analysis and drive preventative improvement through enhanced automation.
- Actively manage technical debt within platform automation codebases.
- Continuously refine automation to improve efficiency, quality, and resilience.
Leadership, Coaching & Enablement
- Provide senior technical leadership and mentoring to Junior and Graduate engineers.
- Set expectations for coding quality, automation practices, and operational ownership.
- Enable delivery and operations teams to safely consume platform automation through clear guidance and tooling.
- Contribute to engineering culture, promoting automation‑first, code‑driven delivery.
Education and Experience Requirements
Essential Experience
- Significant, hands‑on experience designing, building, and operating on‑premise infrastructure platforms within enterprise or highly regulated environments.
- Proven experience delivering Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of infrastructure.
- Demonstrable experience working in security‑constrained or regulated environments, such as defence, government, or critical national infrastructure.
- Experience contributing to or establishing technical standards, automation patterns, and strategic direction for platform engineering.
Technical Experience
- Strong experience with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, including cluster design, operation, and automation.
- Experience supporting or automating Citrix platforms (e.g. virtual apps and desktops) within secure enterprise environments.
- Solid understanding of traditional data‑centre technologies including compute, storage, networking, and identity services.
- Hands‑on experience building, configuring, and automating SQL Server platforms.
- Experience supporting multi‑tier enterprise applications hosted on on‑premise infrastructure.
- Understanding of how collaboration platforms are underpinned by identity, database, and application services.
Automation & Infrastructure as Code
- Strong practical experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell DSC, or equivalent).
- Proven ability to create reusable, version‑controlled automation artefacts.
- Experience integrating infrastructure automation into CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience embedding security controls, identity integration, access models, and configuration hardening into automated builds.
- Familiarity with accreditation, assurance, and audit processes in secure environments.
- Experience supporting live platforms, responding to incidents, and driving automation‑led improvements.
Leadership & Professional Experience
- Experience operating as a senior technical engineer, providing guidance and technical leadership to peers.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction and challenge legacy approaches with pragmatic, automation‑led solutions.
- Comfortable acting as a trusted technical advisor to architects, security teams, and delivery stakeholders.
LA International is an award‑winning partner of choice for many of the world’s most influential companies and government organisations. Holding Enhanced Government Security Accreditation, we are recognised as the European market leader in the delivery of Security Cleared talent to organisations that demand the very highest levels of security, compliance and assurance.
A multiple award‑winning organisation, having secured the prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade over consecutive years. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable and accessible workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We welcome applications from all individuals, regardless of background or identity, and we encourage candidates who may not meet every listed requirement to still apply. If you require any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to ensure a fair and accessible experience.
Please note: If a high volume of applications is received, only candidates shortlisted will be contacted.
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