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About us
DS Smith has embarked on an ambitious digital and data transformation journey to drive innovation, operational excellence, and sustainable growth. As a leading provider of sustainable packaging solutions, the company recognises the pivotal role of digital and data capabilities in staying competitive and delivering exceptional value to its customers.
About the role
The Platform Engineer (Digital & Data) role will play a crucial role in onboarding teams to our platform and implementing our platform strategy for the Digital & Data Hub. It’s a hands-on role with strong focus on our internal customers that calls for Linux-centric platform engineering skills as well as the ability to communicate architecture in diagrams and writing.
The impact and goal of this role is to enable us to have faster and more efficient application development, improving developer productivity and enhancing the overall platform experience.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define, prioritise and refine core platform capabilities; prominent themes include sensible defaults, self-service, reduction of cognitive load, observability, security policy and the elimination of toil.
- Work towards simplicity and avoid tight coupling where possible; optimise for work not done.
- As a member of the on-call rota, ensure that we follow up on incidents, mute nuisance alerts and tackle issues before our customers stumble upon them.
- Support collaboration and knowledge sharing with other teams or stakeholders, particularly in the Business Units as these will be key partners for the platform engineering who will often be involved in cross-functional coordination.
- Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles and tools such as Terraform.
- Maintain our EKS Kubernetes clusters with an eye on the simplest configuration we can get away with
- Formulate security and network policy in such a way that platform users can do easily what they should do and are prevented from doing what they shouldn’t.
- Monitor system health and automate routine tasks.
- Participate in an on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support and incident response.
- Contribute to templates, tests, runbooks and documentation (in that order).
- Act as mentor to members of the graduate programme, some of whom spend three months working on the digital and data platform.
About you
- A Bachelor’s degree in a STEM subject is a plus, but so is relevant industry experience
- Experience in platform engineering and/or DevOps, preferably with significant exposure to AWS and Kubernetes.
- Strong command of Python, our preferred platform language
- Love of Linux command line tools and scripts
- Track record of building platforms
- Experience of growing a platform’s networking and security maturity
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to lead incident retrospectives focused on learning from what happened, not apportioning blame
- AWS certifications (e.g. Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) are an advantage but not a requirement
- Experience with Agile methodologies and DevOps practices
“To fulfil our purpose of redefining packaging for a changing world, we aim to build a diverse, motivated, and engaged workforce. Our goal is to create a culture of inclusion where everyone is treated fairly, differences are valued, and everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.
Our people come from diverse backgrounds, bring different perspectives, ideas and experiences to generate unique solutions focused on present and future sustainability challenges. We welcome all candidates to apply, even those not meeting all criteria.”