Principal Platform Engineer

Internal use only - Grade E

About us.

We’re the team behind digital retailer Very.

Our purpose, helping families get more out of life, powers everything we do.

And we want our people to get more out of life too! If you’re high-performing, ambitious and make the most of every opportunity, we want to hear from you. In return, you’ll enjoy heaps of flexibility, great perks and benefits, and the freedom to be yourself, keep learning and take your career wherever you want it to go.

If you love making a difference, you’ll love making it sparkle for millions of Very customers. ✨

About the role

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping, evolving and supporting the core platforms that underpin our engineering ecosystem. You’ll design, build, operate and continuously improve the tools, services and infrastructure that our engineers rely on to deliver business change quickly and safely.

Your internal customers are your engineering colleagues, and you’ll collaborate closely across teams to enable them to deliver exceptional outcomes. You will lead by doing — exploring new technologies, driving best practices, advocating for automation, and helping to create a modern, reliable and scalable platform landscape.

You’ll bring curiosity, adaptability and a willingness to experiment. We value an agile mindset, a focus on evolutionary architecture, and a belief that failing fast is far better than standing still.

What you will work on

• Designing, building and maintaining secure, reliable and reusable cloud infrastructure
• Developing and optimising CI/CD pipelines with robust testing, linting and deployment automation
• Managing integrations across hosting platforms, applications and supporting services
• Reducing toil through intelligent automation and improved tooling
• Providing expert guidance and hands‑on solutions to complex business and platform challenges
• Championing engineering excellence, platform reliability and modern ways of working

About You

You’re a strong problem solver who thrives in complex environments. You’re comfortable using monitoring and logging tools to understand what’s happening under the hood, and you’re able to develop inventive, practical solutions when problems arise. You’re adaptable, technically curious and confident taking ownership of critical systems.

You combine deep technical experience with the ability to think strategically, collaborating across teams to drive improvements in reliability, automation and performance.

What you will bring

• Exceptional troubleshooting skills, with experience using monitoring and logging tools to diagnose and resolve complex issues
• Puppet & configuration management expertise, including maintaining and optimising large, multi‑environment configurations
• Solid programming and scripting ability, including:
• Java programming
• Bash, PowerShell, Python or similar scripting languages for automation
• WebLogic & Oracle Fusion experience, including WebLogic administration and familiarity with Oracle Fusion OSB / SOA, ideally within Oracle 12c
• CI/CD & version control knowledge, including GitLab, Jenkins and SVN
• Strong Linux administration skills, including system and user management, text processing, file handling and performance analysis
• Networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VPNs, firewalls and SSL certificates
• Basic database understanding, including PL/SQL and general DBA principles
• Experience with cloud migrations, re‑platforming or re‑architecting applications (advantageous)

Some of our benefits

• Flexible, hybrid working model
• Inclusive culture and environment

• £1,000 flexible benefits allowance to suit your needs
• 30 days holiday + bank holidays
• Up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk

• Matched pension up to 6%
• More benefits can be found on our career site

How to apply

Please note that the talent acquisition team are managing this vacancy directly, and if successful in securing this role, you will be required to undertake a credit, CIFAS, Right to Work checks and if a specific requirement of your role a DBS (criminal records) check. Should your application progress we require you to let the team know if there is anything you need to disclose in relation to any of these checks prior to them being undertaken, including any unspent criminal convictions.

What happens next?

Our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch if you’re successful so keep an eye on your emails! We’ll arrange a short call to learn more about you, as well as answer any questions you have.

For this role after meeting our Talent Acquisition Team you can expect a 2 stage process.

First Stage - A Technical Interview - likely to be on Teams

Second Stage - Behavioural Interview, this interview focuses more on your softer skills, how you like to work as part of a Software Engineering Team (60 minutes onsite)

If you'd like to know more about our interviews, you can find out here.

Diversity, inclusion and equal opportunities
We’re building a culture of everyday inclusion, and welcome applications from anyone who believes they can do the job. We don’t discriminate based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

We want our recruitment process to be accessible to everyone. If you need reasonable adjustments to apply, interview, or perform a role, let us know via talentacquisition@theverygroup.com. We’ll be happy to support you.

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer and have nine brilliant colleague networks - including DAWN (Disability Awareness at Very) and Think (Neurodiversity at Very) - that are helping us make Very an even more inclusive place to work.