Senior Platform Engineer (DevEx and Cloud Ops)

We’re On the Beach! Since 2003, we've been rewriting the rules of how people discover, book, and experience their perfect getaway. What started as connecting people to short-haul beach holidays has evolved into something much bigger - premium beach destinations, long-haul adventures, and vibrant city breaks – and that’s just the beginning of our story.

We send around two million holidaymakers on their dream breaks every year. And we're still growing.

Powered by our deep-rooted entrepreneurial spirit, proprietary tech, curiosity and our incredible people, we’re accelerating - delivering best in class technology, the ultimate holiday app, and experiences that keep our customers coming back for more.

Ready to build the future of travel with us?

About the Role

At On the Beach, millions of customers use our technology to discover, plan and book their holidays every year.

Behind that experience is an engineering organisation that needs reliable infrastructure, great tooling and simple ways of building and running software. We’re continuing to invest in our engineering platform and are looking for Senior Platform Engineers to help us make that experience better.

You’ll work across cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, automation and operational engineering to help our product teams build, deploy and operate software more effectively.

Depending on your background, you may naturally lean more towards areas such as AWS and cloud infrastructure, developer experience, CI/CD, internal tooling, reliability or automation. We don’t expect every Platform Engineer to be an expert in everything.

What matters most is that you understand modern platform engineering and enjoy solving problems that make engineering teams faster, cheaper, safer and more effective.

AI is also changing how software is built, and we want our platform to evolve alongside it.

You’ll have the opportunity to explore how AI-assisted tooling can remove friction, improve engineering workflows and support new ways of working. The existing draft already makes this a significant part of the role.

What you’ll be doing day to day

• You’ll work closely with engineers across Product Engineering, Digital Workplace and InfoSec to understand problems and turn them into simple, scalable platform solutions. That cross-team element is already one of the strongest parts of the current description.

• Your work could include improving self-service tooling, building reusable infrastructure and deployment patterns, developing CI/CD capabilities, improving cloud reliability and scalability, reducing developer friction, and helping teams better understand the performance and cost of the systems they operate.

• You’ll also contribute to observability, security and FinOps, helping us balance reliability, performance, security and cloud cost.

• As part of supporting the reliability of our cloud platform, there may also be occasional on-call responsibilities to help monitor systems and respond to issues when required.

• As a Senior Engineer, you’ll be trusted to take ownership of complex problems, make pragmatic technical decisions and help shape how our platform evolves.

• You’ll also support other engineers through pairing, code reviews, technical discussions and knowledge sharing.

You’ll be a great addition to our team if you have the following skills, knowledge and experience

We’re looking for an experienced engineer with a strong background in platform, cloud, infrastructure or developer tooling.

You’ll ideally have experience working with AWS and modern cloud-native environments, along with some combination of infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, automation and developer tooling.

You don’t need to have worked with every technology we use. We’re much more interested in your ability to understand complex systems, make sensible engineering trade-offs and build solutions that other engineers genuinely want to use.

You should be comfortable working across team boundaries, taking ambiguous problems and turning them into practical solutions.

We’d also like you to be someone who thinks beyond simply keeping infrastructure running. Great platform engineering should improve the experience of the engineers using it.

You’ll care about areas such as:

• AWS and cloud-native engineering

• Infrastructure as code and automation

• CI/CD and software delivery

• Developer tooling and self-service platforms

• Kubernetes and containerised environments

• Observability, reliability and incident management

• Security and sensible engineering guardrails

• Cloud cost and FinOps

• AI-assisted engineering and automation

• Mentoring and sharing knowledge with other engineers

Why join the Platform team?

This is an opportunity to have a genuine impact on how engineering works at On the Beach.

Rather than supporting a single product area, the things you build can improve how teams across the organisation develop and operate software.

You’ll have space to experiment with new technologies and approaches, while keeping a pragmatic focus on reliability, security, cost and business value. That balance is already well expressed in the existing draft.

You’ll also have the opportunity to help shape what modern platform engineering looks like for us as our cloud estate, internal tooling and use of AI continue to evolve.

What to expect from our interview process

We’ll run a multiple stage interview process, one stage of which will be an in-person interview at our fabulous Aeroworks office in Manchester city centre.

We want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to perform at their best. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process please let the Talent Acquisition team know and they will be happy to assist.

Ways of working
Our full time hours are 37.5 per week, but we don't have rigid working hours so you can find the working pattern that's right for you. We have core working hours between 10am - 4pm, so we can collaborate and enjoy the social side of work.

We also have hybrid working so we all work from home and from our Aeroworks office in Manchester City Centre. As a team we are in the office 2 days per week (usually Tuesday & Wednesday).

Our benefits
We might be biased but we think our colleagues are pretty great. They're the people that have made On the Beach what it is today and continue to make it vibrant and successful tomorrow. That's why we offer a competitive benefits package, known as our Beach Perks, to all On the Beach colleagues.

These include:

• 25 days holiday plus your birthday off

• Generous discount on holidays, plus you will receive 2 extra days annual leave on top of your holiday allowance to use whilst you're away on your On the Beach package holiday

• Access to Learnerbly learning platform, plus workshops, courses and professional qualifications

• Enhanced maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and adoption pay, plus other family friendly support

• Employee Assistance Programme and free access to counselling

• Simplyhealth Optimise Health Plan

• Company Sick Pay scheme

• Regular wellbeing events

• Gym discount

• Share Incentive Plan (SIP)

• Death in Service cover

• Onsite subsidised coffee shop

• The Sandbox (our very own bar)

• Food and drink discounts across a number of venues in Manchester City Centre

• Regular social events

• Cycle to Work scheme