Principal Platform Engineer (Edge)

Key areas of responsibility

• Contributing to the architecture of Rowden's edge platform end-to-end, from the operating system layer through to workload orchestration, lifecycle management, and observability.
• Helping shape our edge operating system strategy, including immutable, signed, minimal-footprint base images suitable for constrained and field-deployed hardware.
• Designing and implementing remote orchestration mechanisms that are robust to denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited connectivity.
• Working on security baselines for edge nodes, including secure boot, hardware-rooted identity, attestation, and the runtime isolation of workloads.
• Building observability, logging, and telemetry capabilities that work when bandwidth is scarce and devices are intermittently reachable.
• Designing zero-touch onboarding and provisioning flows so devices come online securely without manual configuration in the field.
• Developing infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and automation patterns across the edge fleet and the supporting control plane.
• Contributing to key technical decisions, weighing trade-offs, managing risk, and helping ensure long-term maintainability across interconnected systems.
• Sharing knowledge with platform and software engineers across the organisation, lifting overall engineering capability through example and collaboration.
• Working directly with users, partners, and stakeholders to make sure the platform meets real operational needs, not just theoretical ones.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

• Experience designing, building, and operating platforms for distributed or edge environments.
• Strong experience with container orchestration tools and an understanding of where they work well at the edge and where they don't.
• Hands-on experience with immutable infrastructure patterns, signed images, and reproducible builds.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code background (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent) and modern CI/CD.
• Practical experience of secure boot, TPM/HSM, remote attestation, and certificate-based device identity.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, sufficient to build platform tooling and contribute to core components.
• Experience designing systems that operate correctly through network partitions, link loss, and long offline periods.
• Proven ability to influence engineering direction and operate autonomously in complex and ambiguous environments.

• Background delivering complex connected systems in regulated sectors such as defence, national security, telecommunications, or critical infrastructure.
• Experience with edge-oriented operating systems, hypervisors, or device-management platforms.
• Linux internals knowledge and the practicalities of running it on constrained hardware.
• Experience with mesh, overlay, or software-defined networking integrated at the platform layer.

• Mission-Focused: You care about enabling others to do their best work and about systems that actually function for real users in real conditions.
• Hands On: You're excited by building, not by delegating.
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously learn and you're comfortable working in spaces where the right answer isn't yet known.
• Pragmatic: You choose solutions that work in practice, and you know when to use the standard tool and when the problem genuinely needs something different.
• Systems thinker: You reason naturally about large-scale, interconnected systems and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Relentless: You see hard problems through to resolution rather than handing them off.
• Collaborative: You help other engineers grow through guidance, review, and example.

Working at Rowden