Principal Platform Engineer

Internal use only - Grade E

About us.

We’re the team behind digital retailer Very.

Our purpose, helping families get more out of life, powers everything we do.

And we want our people to get more out of life too! If you’re high-performing, ambitious and make the most of every opportunity, we want to hear from you. In return, you’ll enjoy heaps of flexibility, great perks and benefits, and the freedom to be yourself, keep learning and take your career wherever you want it to go.

If you love making a difference, you’ll love making it sparkle for millions of Very customers. ✨

About the role

At Very, great engineering doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built on strong foundations, smart tooling and platforms that make it easier to move fast and do things right.

This role sits right at the heart of that.

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you’ll shape the platforms that hundreds of engineers rely on every day. You’ll make it faster to build, safer to release and easier to scale. The impact of your work will be felt across every product, every team and every customer experience we deliver.

If you enjoy solving complex problems, improving how things work and seeing your ideas adopted at scale, you’ll feel right at home here.

This is a role with real reach.

You’ll be designing and evolving the core platform that underpins our engineering ecosystem. Your customers are internal, but your impact goes far beyond that. When you improve the platform, you improve everything we build on top of it.

You’ll have the space to experiment, the backing to introduce better ways of working and the influence to raise the bar for engineering across the business.

You won’t just keep things running. You’ll make them better, simpler and more resilient.

What you will work on

• Shape and evolve our cloud infrastructure so it’s secure, scalable and built for reuse
• Make it easier for engineers to build and release by improving CI/CD pipelines and automation
• Reduce friction and manual effort by introducing smarter tooling and eliminating toil
• Solve complex platform challenges and guide teams through them with practical, hands-on support
• Connect systems, platforms and services so they work seamlessly together
• Spot opportunities to improve performance, reliability and developer experience and make them happen
• Champion modern engineering practices and help teams adopt them with confidence

About You

You’re someone who enjoys getting underneath the surface of complex systems and figuring out how to make them work better.

You’re comfortable balancing hands-on engineering with bigger-picture thinking, and you naturally look for ways to improve how things are done.

You’ll bring:

• Strong troubleshooting skills and a curiosity for how systems behave in the real world
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure, automation and configuration management
• A solid background in scripting or programming, whether that’s Java, Python, Bash or similar
• Confidence working across Linux environments, networking fundamentals and integrated systems
• An understanding of CI/CD and version control, and how they come together to support great delivery
• Experience working in complex environments where scale, reliability and dependencies really matter.

Some of our benefits

• Flexible, hybrid working model
• Inclusive culture and environment
• £1,000 flexible benefits allowance to suit your needs
• 30 days holiday + bank holidays
• Up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk
• Matched pension up to 6%
• More benefits can be found on our career site

How to apply

Please note that the talent acquisition team are managing this vacancy directly, and if successful in securing this role, you will be required to undertake a credit, CIFAS, Right to Work checks and if a specific requirement of your role a DBS (criminal records) check. Should your application progress we require you to let the team know if there is anything you need to disclose in relation to any of these checks prior to them being undertaken, including any unspent criminal convictions.

What happens next?

Our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch if you’re successful so keep an eye on your emails! We’ll arrange a short call to learn more about you, as well as answer any questions you have.

For this role after meeting our Talent Acquisition Team you can expect a 2 stage process.

First Stage - A Technical Interview - likely to be on Teams

Second Stage - Behavioural Interview, this interview focuses more on your softer skills, how you like to work as part of a Software Engineering Team (60 minutes onsite)

If you'd like to know more about our interviews, you can find out here.

Diversity, inclusion and equal opportunities
We’re building a culture of everyday inclusion, and welcome applications from anyone who believes they can do the job. We don’t discriminate based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

We want our recruitment process to be accessible to everyone. If you need reasonable adjustments to apply, interview, or perform a role, let us know via talentacquisition@theverygroup.com. We’ll be happy to support you.

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer and have nine brilliant colleague networks - including DAWN (Disability Awareness at Very) and Think (Neurodiversity at Very) - that are helping us make Very an even more inclusive place to work.