Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer Our Mission At Vertical Aerospace, we are pioneering the way for electric aviation. The Valo, our eVTOL (electric, vertical, take-off and landing), 'zero emissions' aircraft will set a new safety standard for how we will navigate the sky. We won't realise our mission following the same legacy processes and traditions our predecessors followed, instead, we want to 'redefine' aerospace best practices. We are growing quickly from a prototype business to a scaling SME, and the next few years will be critical to our success and delivering on our ambitious goals. Valo is targeting airliner-level safety certification in 2028 ahead of entering service with our airline and operator customers. WHAT TO EXPECT As a Platform Engineer, you will join a team dedicated to building and operating the digital foundations that underpin our aircraft, engineering platforms, and business systems. A typical day could range from designing and automating cloud infrastructure in Azure, to improving the reliability and resilience of our hybrid environment, to enhancing our security posture through vulnerability mitigation and compliance activities. You may be developing infrastructure-as-code in Terraform, performing disaster recovery testing, working with Active Directory and Hyper-V teams, or collaborating with engineering functions to support their compute and platform needs. Your ability to move fast, solve complex systems challenges, and continuously improve infrastructure reliability will be crucial to the impact you make in this role. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Take ownership of the security posture, resilience, and reliability of our platforms, including vulnerability mitigation, configuration hardening, and monitoring. - Maintain and modernise our hybrid infrastructure spanning Azure cloud services, on-premise Hyper-V servers, and Microsoft Active Directory. - Manage and regularly test our backup, disaster recovery (DR), and business continuity (BCP) processes. - Design, automate, and operate cloud services across Azure (and future AWS workloads) using Terraform, Azure DevOps, and scripting languages. - Develop observability and monitoring standards using tools such as DataDog, Grafana, and Prometheus. - Support container-based workloads through Azure Container Apps, AKS, and related services. - Ensure operational excellence and continuous improvement aligned with frameworks such as ISO 27001. - Partner with engineering, security, and cross-functional teams to build scalable, reliable, secure systems. - Contribute to the development of a modern, multi-cloud, hybrid platform strategy. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - Strong experience with Azure cloud services and infrastructure management, including Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, Container Apps/Instances, AKS, Azure Storage, and Azure Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL). - Experience administering Hyper-V, Linux, and Microsoft Active Directory environments. - Solid grounding in observability tools (DataDog / Grafana / Prometheus). - Hands-on experience with Terraform, Azure DevOps, and scripting (PowerShell, Python, Bash). - Proven experience in vulnerability mitigation, security best practices, and ISO 27001 compliance. - Experience with backup, recovery, and DR/BCP testing. - Track record of automating, scaling, and supporting production platforms. - A mindset centred on automation, resilience, and continuous improvement. DESIRED - Experience with Azure High Performance Compute (HPC) or Slurm workload scheduling. - Experience with Kubernetes, Flux, Helm, and GitOps principles. - Experience building or supporting developer platforms (CI/CD tooling, environment automation, internal developer portals). - Database experience (MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL). - Strong understanding of network fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, VPNs, VLANs, routing). - Familiarity with AWS or multi-cloud architectures. #LI-AH1 What can you expect from us? We're on a mission. Where others see limit ... (truncated, view full listing at source)