Principal Platform Engineer (Edge)

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Bristol, UK

Reporting To: Stephen Pope

Description

We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 160 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe's fastest-growing engineering businesses.

About the role
We're looking for a Principal Platform Engineer who is motivated by hard distributed systems problems and the realities of operating software at the edge. You are comfortable designing platforms that cannot assume stable connectivity, consistent cluster membership, or a persistent central control plane, and you understand why conventional orchestration approaches often break down in constrained, fragmented, or disrupted environments.

You will have strong experience building and operating containerised platforms, orchestration systems, or distributed infrastructure. You may have worked with Kubernetes or related technologies, but you will also recognise where centralised, control-plane-driven models are the wrong fit. You are interested in approaches based on declarative workload intent, local orchestration decisions, peer coordination, and systems that can operate independently during disconnection.

You are the sort of engineer who thinks carefully about failure modes, deployment risk, observability, workload lifecycle, service discovery, and operational simplicity. You care about building robust abstractions that allow application teams to securely deploy workloads without needing to understand the underlying orchestration model. You are equally comfortable writing production code, shaping architecture, setting engineering standards, and working with other experienced engineers to turn an emerging technical concept into a reliable platform capability.

This role will suit someone who wants to remain hands-on, make pragmatic technical decisions, and build infrastructure for environments where disconnection, disruption, and constrained resources are normal operating conditions.

This role offers hybrid working with a minimum of 3 days per week on-site at our Bristol HQ.

Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance. 
More information about security clearance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels

Key areas of responsibility

As a Principal Platform Engineer at Rowden, you will be responsible for:

• Contributing to the architecture of Rowden's edge platform end-to-end, from the operating system layer through to workload orchestration, lifecycle management, and observability.
• Helping shape our edge operating system strategy, including immutable, signed, minimal-footprint base images suitable for constrained and field-deployed hardware.
• Designing and implementing remote orchestration mechanisms that are robust to denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited connectivity.
• Working on security baselines for edge nodes, including secure boot, hardware-rooted identity, attestation, and the runtime isolation of workloads.
• Building observability, logging, and telemetry capabilities that work when bandwidth is scarce and devices are intermittently reachable.
• Designing zero-touch onboarding and provisioning flows so devices come online securely without manual configuration in the field.
• Developing infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and automation patterns across the edge fleet and the supporting control plane.
• Contributing to key technical decisions, weighing trade-offs, managing risk, and helping ensure long-term maintainability across interconnected systems.
• Sharing knowledge with platform and software engineers across the organisation, lifting overall engineering capability through example and collaboration.
• Working directly with users, partners, and stakeholders to make sure the platform meets real operational needs, not just theoretical ones.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

We are looking for a highly capable, hands-on principal engineer who has built platforms that other engineers genuinely rely on.

Essential

• Experience designing, building, and operating platforms for distributed or edge environments.
• Strong experience with container orchestration tools and an understanding of where they work well at the edge and where they don't.
• Hands-on experience with immutable infrastructure patterns, signed images, and reproducible builds.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code background (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent) and modern CI/CD.
• Practical experience of secure boot, TPM/HSM, remote attestation, and certificate-based device identity.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, sufficient to build platform tooling and contribute to core components.
• Experience designing systems that operate correctly through network partitions, link loss, and long offline periods.
• Proven ability to influence engineering direction and operate autonomously in complex and ambiguous environments.

Desirable (not essential)

• Background delivering complex connected systems in regulated sectors such as defence, national security, telecommunications, or critical infrastructure.
• Experience with edge-oriented operating systems, hypervisors, or device-management platforms.
• Linux internals knowledge and the practicalities of running it on constrained hardware.
• Experience with mesh, overlay, or software-defined networking integrated at the platform layer.

About you

• Mission-Focused: You care about enabling others to do their best work and about systems that actually function for real users in real conditions.
• Hands On: You're excited by building, not by delegating.
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously learn and you're comfortable working in spaces where the right answer isn't yet known.
• Pragmatic: You choose solutions that work in practice, and you know when to use the standard tool and when the problem genuinely needs something different.
• Systems thinker: You reason naturally about large-scale, interconnected systems and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Relentless: You see hard problems through to resolution rather than handing them off.
• Collaborative: You help other engineers grow through guidance, review, and example.

Working at Rowden

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are! We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants. Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible. Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!