Platform Engineer
FairPlay Sports Media is building a tech-led, AI and data-powered sports media network. The Platform team provides the infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and observability that let multiple engineering teams ship and operate reliable, compliant, high-throughput products.
FairPlay Sports Media is looking for a hands-on, pragmatic Platform Engineer (DevOps / Infrastructure) to own and deliver components within its Google Cloud Platform estate. This role focuses on CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and Kubernetes-based workloads. The engineer will take part in the on-call rotation, automate operational toil, apply secure-by-default practices, and support product development squads with the environments, pipelines, and tooling they need. The role involves working with limited oversight on 2–3 month pieces of work and contributing to larger initiatives led by Senior engineers.
- Design, build, and operate GCP infrastructure (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, VPC networking) as Terraform, following and contributing to the team’s shared modules and standards.
- Deploy and run services on GKE - workloads, networking, storage, autoscaling, and Helm-based configuration - and help product development squads containerise and operate their applications well.
- Build and maintain GitLab CI pipelines: artifact management, environment promotion, and safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rollback), with policy and security checks baked in.
- Identify toil and remove it with Python, Go, or Bash tooling; improve self-service for product development squads (environments, access, deployments).
- Use Claude Code and adjacent tooling deliberately as part of day-to-day work - managing context, using sub-agents for investigation and adversarial review, and writing reusable skills (prompt-driven automations) for repeat tasks.
- Build and maintain metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (Google Cloud Operations Suite, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry or equivalents) for the components you own; define and track SLIs/SLOs.
- Take part in a week-long 24hr on-call rotation: respond to escalations from product teams and to platform-owned alerts; triage, mitigate, and escalate following our incident process.
- Write and maintain accurate runbooks; contribute to blameless post-incident reviews and see durable follow-up actions through to completion.
- Factor upcoming critical business events - peak sporting fixtures, market launches, B2B go-lives - into your work, and support load testing, capacity, and failover checks led by Senior engineers.
- Implement least-privilege IAM, Workload Identity, and service account hygiene in the components you build; escalate design decisions with wider security or compliance implications.
- Use Google Secret Manager and Cloud KMS for secrets and encryption; keep configuration safe and auditable; ensure credentials never end up in code or pipelines.
- Contribute to policy-as-code across Terraform and security scanning (SCA/SAST, container image scanning) in GitLab pipelines, working alongside our Security function.
- Consider security during design, raise implications explicitly, and contribute to security reviews of your own and others’ components.
- Understand product development squads’ needs, unblock delivery, and communicate progress, risks, and operational status clearly.
- Deliver alongside Senior engineers; contribute to shared modules, patterns, and standards; write clear documentation for what you own.
- Pair with and review the work of Junior engineers, explaining your decisions so they can learn from them.
- 3–5 years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Engineering within a modern cloud environment, delivering production infrastructure with limited oversight (required)
- Solid hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (Compute, IAM, VPC, GKE, Cloud Storage, managed data services) and containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes (required)
- Proficient with Terraform - modules, state management, and reviewing changes safely (required)
- Proficient at building and debugging pipelines (GitLab CI or similar), including artifact handling and deployment strategies (required)
- Proficient with metrics, logs, and traces; has built dashboards and actionable alerting and understands SLIs/SLOs (required)
- Proficient with Linux systems (processes, filesystems, systemd, shell) and a working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and VPC networking (required)
- Proficient in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash, and able to read the others (required)
- Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation and handling common incidents calmly and methodically (required)
- Working knowledge of secure-by-default practices in cloud infrastructure: least privilege, secrets management, safe configuration (required)
- Experience with high-traffic or real-time systems (sports, betting, finance, media streaming) (nice-to-have)
- Hands-on use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) with an understanding of context management, sub-agents, MCP, and hooks (nice-to-have)
- Experience with GitOps-style workflows (e.g. Argo CD or Flux) for managing Kubernetes and infrastructure changes (nice-to-have)
- Exposure to policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest, Sentinel, or similar) and security scanning in pipelines (nice-to-have)
- Exposure to security or compliance practices in regulated environments (e.g. gambling regulation, SOC 2, ISO 27001) (nice-to-have)
- Cost and efficiency awareness in cloud environments (rightsizing, committed use, FinOps practices) (nice-to-have)
- Relevant certifications (GCP Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect, CKA) (nice-to-have)
- On-call duties and escalations are additionally compensated via callout pay.
FairPlay Sports Media is a global sports media network that builds and engages communities of sports fans and bettors to create value for its betting, advertising and media partners. Previously known as Oddschecker Global Media, it rebranded in 2024 and traces its origins to oddschecker, which launched in 1999. Its portfolio includes oddschecker, WhoScored, vime, the Confido Network and CasinoSmash, processing around 100 million data updates per week and reaching over 100 million unique users monthly. Headquartered in London, the group works with more than 100 partners worldwide.