Staff Platform Engineer (Azure, Kubernetes)

Department: Engineering

Location: Cardiff

Description

Join the Platform Engineering team at Confused.com and help build the internal developer platform, CI/CD, and reliability tooling that lets our engineering teams ship change quickly, safely, and securely.

Confused.com is the UK's first car insurance comparison site. Since 2002 we have helped people cut through the confusion of comparing insurance and financial products so they save time and money. We are part of RVU, alongside Uswitch, Tempcover, and Money.co.uk. Our platforms serve millions of users a month, process thousands of comparisons a day, and run hundreds of partner integrations.

Our platform teams exist to make other engineers faster. We are building a standardised, opinionated platform that takes routine platform work off product teams and reduces their cognitive load, so they can focus on shipping business change. You provide the tooling, infrastructure, and developer experience that let product teams deliver with confidence, and you bring those teams with you as you introduce shared standards. We want engineers who care about the people who use what they build, and who judge their work by whether delivery speed and reliability actually improve.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead and evangelise. Set platform direction and take the organisation with you. Champion the platform offering to engineers and product owners, justify the standards you introduce, and absorb the challenge that comes with moving people towards a shared, opinionated platform.
• Rigour: Use logs, metrics, and cost data to decide what to build and to prove whether it worked, not only to monitor what already runs.
• Ownership: Hold ownership of technical strategy and decisions across the platform, its domains, and its systems. Make those decisions collaboratively and back them with data.
• Delivery: Own the stack end to end against business requirements. Build efficient CI/CD pipelines and robust DevOps practices.
• Reliability: Run containers at scale on Kubernetes. Keep systems performant, scalable, and reliable, and design them to tolerate failure.
• Collaboration: Work directly with different engineering teams so your tools solve real problems, not assumed ones.
• Culture: Share what you know and challenge what you disagree with in technical forums, working groups, and all hands.
• AI-assisted delivery: use AI development tools such as Claude to build and ship in languages the team is less experienced in, and set the standard for how to do that well and safely.
  
  

What You Are Accountable For

• Objective setting, feature ideation, development, and measurement.
• Architectural decisions and designs for the platform, domains, and systems.
• Defining, evolving, and applying team processes.
• Building CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• Mentoring and coaching engineers, and presenting what you learn back to the wider organisation.
  
  

What We're Looking For

• A track record of getting engineering and product teams to adopt shared platforms and standards, even when it changes how they work. This is a leadership role, not a pure individual-contributor one.
• Built and operated highly available, scalable, consumer-facing systems in both large and small agile teams.
• Designed and built cost-optimised cloud platforms from the ground up, preferably Azure, on well-architected principles.
• Deep experience running containers at scale on Kubernetes, ideally Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Strong observability practice, for platform and cluster health and as a product shipped to teams.
• A broad grasp of platform, developer experience (DevEx) and SRE across the whole delivery lifecycle: performance, analytics and security, not one narrow speciality.
• Rolled out SLOs across an organisation to drive error budgets and alerting, built fault-tolerant systems, and comfortable with incident and problem management.
• Fluent with AI development tools such as Claude, and able to set the standard for using them well and safely to build in unfamiliar languages.
• Learns unfamiliar technology fast and grasps it strategically, rather than plateauing at surface level.
• Command of the software development lifecycle: testing, version control, branching, and deployment.
• Built APIs or CLIs that solve internal problems and give engineers self-service tooling.
• Pragmatic and outcome-focused: you ship daily, own your decisions, and treat feedback and failed experiments as how you learn.
  
  

Benefits

We want to give you a great work environment, support your growth both personally and professionally, and provide benefits that make your time at RVU even more enjoyable. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to:

• 10% discretionary yearly bonus and yearly pay reviews (based on RVU and personal performance)
• A hybrid working approach with 2 in-office days per week and up to 22 working days per year to “work from anywhere”
• Employer matching pension contributions up to 7.5%
• A one-off £300 “work from home” budget to help contribute towards a great work environment at home
• Excellent maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption leave policy, for those key moments in your life
• 25 days holiday (increasing to 30 days) + 2 days “my time” per year
• Private medical cover, critical illness cover, dental plans and employee assistance programme
• Free gym access
• Employee discounts programme
• A healthy learning and training budget to support your development
• Electric vehicle and cycle to work scheme
• Regular events - from team socials to company-wide events with insightful external speakers, we want to make sure our colleagues continue to feel connected.