Principal Platform Engineer
Brackley, UK
At the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, a group of passionate and determined people work to design, develop, manufacture and race the cars driven by seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton and Grand Prix winner George Russell.
Whether working in our Operations, Technical, Race or Business Support functions, we are all in and aspire to build the greatest team in the history of our sport.
Every individual plays their part. No stone is left unturned in the chase for every tenth of a second. The history of our sport is long and rich, and we are continuing our journey with renewed effort year on year. Record books remember the names of a few, but history is written by the many.
About the Role:
Our Core Technology Team are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer who has the passion and determination to lead a team of engineers to deliver and own platforms and capabilities that underpin IT services for the Team. You will thrive on working in a fast paced and ever-changing environment in a role where you get to create innovative solutions across a large portfolio of technologies and see them in use at both the factory and the track.
This role additionally involves coordinating the day-to-day priorities and availability of the IT Platform group and serving as an authority on technical decisions.
Key Responsibilities:
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Leading a team of engineers, sharing best-practice technical experience, and instilling the highest standards to deliver to ITSM and DevOps methodologies, while collaborating with architecture and support teams to ensure optimised and fully streamlined capabilities and roadmaps.
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Implementing infrastructure platforms across all technology stacks to provide secure, reliable, high performing and scalable services for the wider team to consume, with a mix of traditional (datacentres, storage, backup/restore/DR, hypervisor, compute, high-performance compute) and modern (containerisation, cloud, serverless) capabilities and Windows/Linux operating systems.
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Providing monitoring and observability to ensure optimal performance, continual improvement, and proactive identification and resolution of issues.
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Supporting technology platforms for break/fix incidents, including out of hours and escalation where necessary and assisting other teams and consumers to maximise adoption.
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Advocating the use of modern tools and practices to provide automated provisioning and configuration management, e.g. though CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code.
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Collaborating with other IT and business teams to fulfil their needs and continually improve the environments for future provision and providing guidelines for their successful, compliant, and reliable consumption.
Technical Skills and Experience:
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Significant, detailed knowledge and experience of VMware, Kubernetes, storage platforms, and associated underlying infrastructure hardware and provision.
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Experience with Microsoft and Linux technologies, platforms, and services including Active Directory, token-based and certificate authentication.
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Wider experience with various datacentre infrastructures and systems, including cooling, structured cabling, networking and firewalls to enable close working with other technical and site services teams.
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Experience of Cloud and hybrid-based alternatives to on-premises infrastructure, including offerings to complement capacity.
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Experience managing and operating via command line utilities and working to deliver and improve platforms using self-service and automation through modern practises.
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Experience of providing infrastructure for large Enterprise applications such as PLM or ERP platforms.
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Ideally backed up by vendor certifications (e.g. VMware, Microsoft, Linux).
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Experience of leading a technical or project team of some form would be advantageous.
Candidate Profile:
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The successful candidate will bring a wide range of experience and skills and be able to combine them with a high attention to detail, enthusiasm, and curiosity.
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Organised and initiative-taking, able to communicate clearly, and willing to take ownership and accountability for their work in current and future platforms and processes.
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Keen to use intuition to perform deeper analysis of problems outside of current skills and knowledge.
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Experience of working in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities, remaining calm under pressure and able to retain focus during difficult break-fix/downtime scenarios.
Benefits:
Our riverside campus is powered by 100% renewably sourced energy and features an on-site gym and exercise studio, subsidised restaurant and on-site parking with EV chargers available.
We offer a competitive and attractive package of benefits including a generous bonus scheme, Mercedes car lease scheme, private medical cover, life assurance and 25 days holiday. We pride ourselves on our family-friendly environment, employee well-being programme and offer flexible working opportunities.
Why us:
At the heart of our performance are our people. Every member of our team has a voice and plays their part in contributing to our successes on and off the racetrack. We take pride in creating an innovative, collaborative and high-performance culture where all of our team members are respected, empowered and valued.
Through our Accelerate 25 programme, we are continuously working to make our team even more diverse and inclusive. Whatever your background, we believe that you will find working with us rewarding and enriching.