Senior Platform Engineer

Organisation: parkrun Global Limited
Salary: £55,000 - £60,000
Location: Richmond or Leeds
Contract type: Permanent (Full time)
Closing date: 9 January 2026
Job Description: Brief role description:
As a platform engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping digital products and systems that serve millions of parkrun participants and volunteers globally, every week. Your leadership, expertise, and commitment will directly impact our ability to make the world a healthy, happier place.

We’re seeking someone with a track record of leading successful, reliable, and efficient software modernisation solutions at scale, and through transformation. This role will focus on supporting the backend infrastructure of our main event delivery systems, websites and database, as well as the parkrun app and relevant API services that drive our ecosystem. This role will also be required to focus on DevOps best practices to help drive the maturity of our software development processes.

With a relentless drive for improvement and thinking differently, you are a go-getter and one of the main forces behind modernising the parkrun technical infrastructure. This will be a mid-senior level position and you will be responsible for helping evolve and shape the team more broadly.

Main responsibilities:
Establishing solid DevOps patterns across parkruns technical infrastructure.
Ensure InfoSec best practices are adhered to.
Define and implement regular security scans, internally and through third party resource.
Maintaining backup strategy and implementation.
Responsible for supporting the delivery of the transformation of parkrun software practices and standards.
Specification and implementation of innovative technical solutions to support all aspects of business need.
Assistance of the technical team in the maintenance of infrastructure and systems, including incident management.
Act as a technical advocate, guiding the business on the right technical solutions both in the short term with a focus on longer-term architectural best practice.
Responsible for ongoing and thorough process and technical standards documentation.
Participate in out-of-hours rota support alongside the rest of the parkrun technical team.

Essential experience requirements:
Solid DevOps capabilities, including CI/CD pipelines, testing, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / CloudFormation / AWS CDK), containerisation (Docker), and orchestration (ECS / Kubernetes).
Cloud security management.
Maintenance of backup strategy.
Managing penetration tests.
Cloud Identity and Access management.
Proven track record of implementing DevOps best practices at a foundation level as well as at scale.
Strong background in backend design and management, including RESTful APIs, authentication/authorisation standards, and API reliability/performance best practices.
Experience implementing observability practices - logging, metrics, distributed tracing - and supporting production systems with robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
Knowledge and experience of AWS services and best practices.
Deploying solutions at scale with flexibility to react to planned and unexpected loads.
Proven experience maintaining backend services using legacy applications) in cloud environments, as well as modern languages and frameworks.
Strong Git version control skills.
Ability to quickly familiarise oneself with new technologies.
Strong background in backend and full stack engineering at an operational level in previous roles

Desirable experience requirements:
Highly proficient in Agile methodologies.
Experience in delivering accessible, localised solutions for a global audience.
Proficiency in SQL and NoSQL databases.
Experience in data-based transformations.
Demonstrable knowledge of working effectively with product managers and user-driven development methodologies.
Experience working in the charity or sports sector and managing competing priorities with limited resources.
Experience of load testing frameworks.

Professional certification requirements:
Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Relevant certifications (optional but beneficial), such as AWS/Azure/GCP Cloud Certifications, Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), or Data Engineering certifications.

Most relevant skills:
Adaptability: Able to easily adjust to changing circumstances and a growing organisation.
Attention to Detail: Meticulous with a sharp eye for detail and accuracy.
Communication: Able to convey and share ideas, concisely and accurately, both verbally and in writing.
Initiative: Able to be proactive, take initiative and take steps to improve working methods, seeking support where necessary.
Priority Management: Able to manage competing priorities with resilience and thrive in a fast-paced environment.
Problem Solving: Able to detect problems, recognise important information and link various data; to trace potential causes and look for relevant details.
Teamwork: Able to work well with others in multiple situations to achieve a shared goal.
Able to use various IT systems and tools, such as Google Workspace.
Demonstrates high levels of discretion and confidentiality.
Demonstrates a growth mindset, desiring to improve and learn new skills.
How to apply: https://blog.parkrun.com/uk/2025/12/23/join-us-as-senior-platform-engineer/