Senior Platform Engineer (SDEIII)

Our platform is the primary traffic control layer for Tesco Technology, handling over 100 billion requests per month at five‑nines uptime. It routes and secures traffic across thousands of internal APIs, manages external ingress, and proxies Store‑to‑Cloud traffic from 50,000+ tills and devices across the UK, ROI, and Central Europe.

The platform is built on an Envoy control plane with a large, distributed fleet of Envoy proxies forming the data plane. All product engineering teams at Tesco rely on the platform to manage their traffic — routing, policy enforcement, observability, and resilience controls are provided as a shared capability across the organisation. As AI adoption grows, we are extending the same routing, policy, and observability stack to handle emerging Agent‑to‑Agent and MCP traffic — the same control plane problem, applied to new traffic patterns.

You will design, build, and operate this infrastructure. You will own reliability outcomes end‑to‑end and contribute directly to the platform's technical direction.

We are a lean, senior engineering team — we move fast, ownership is high, and there is little distance between an idea and production. There is no separation between building the platform and running it. Engineers rotate between platform capability work and SRE streams so that everyone maintains deep, practical context across the system.

You will work closely with our London‑based engineering team. We default to pairing on complex design problems, production debugging, and incident response — it improves the quality of decisions and keeps knowledge distributed across the team. We work three days a week from the Budapest office.

The platform bridges Store‑to‑Cloud traffic from 50,000+ endpoints with internal API communication at massive throughput, built on a large distributed Envoy data plane with demanding reliability targets. You will join a lean team where ownership is real, the problems are hard, and the engineering decisions you make directly affect how every product engineering team at Tesco manages their traffic. The role covers platform engineering, SRE practice, and hands‑on production ownership, with scope to shape both the platform and how the team operates.

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• Design and operate resilient traffic controls across Store‑to‑Cloud proxying, East‑West and North‑South routing, and emerging AI and MCP traffic — all running through an Envoy control plane and a large distributed data plane fleet.
  
• Own reliability end‑to‑end using SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets to keep the platform stable without sacrificing delivery velocity.
  
• Build internal tooling and automation that improves how we develop, operate, and evolve the platform — reducing toil, improving observability, and making the team faster.
  
• Lead incident response, participating in a two‑person weekly on‑call rotation, running post‑incident reviews, and driving the structural changes that stop the same problems recurring.
  

We care about engineering judgement and production experience more than a specific set of tools. We are looking for engineers who bring some combination of the following:

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• Experience in Platform Engineering or SRE, owning systems where availability directly affects business outcomes.
  
• Practical experience with L7 traffic systems — API gateways, reverse proxies, or control plane / data plane architectures — and a solid understanding of load balancing, rate limiting, and failure modes at scale.
  
• A track record of managing complex production incidents, running sustainable on‑call rotations, and using operational data to drive engineering decisions. xcfaprz
  
• Strong fundamentals across distributed systems, networking, cloud‑native infrastructure, and automation.
  

If the engineering challenge interests you but you do not tick every box, we still want to hear from you.