Cloud Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

ClearRoute is an engineering consultancy bridging Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms and Developer Experience. We help enterprises reliably bring high-impact digital products to market faster, cheaper, and safer, working with technology leaders facing complex business challenges. We take as much pride in our people, culture and work-life balance as we do in making better software. We’re not just making better software. We’re making the making of software better. Collaborative, entrepreneurial and dedicated to problem solving, we bring the step change our customer need to sustain innovation. Our values challenge us to do the best we can for ClearRoute, our customers and most importantly our team.

🏢 About ClearRoute

ClearRoute has been engaged by a client to lead a strategic platform engineering initiative aimed at fundamentally modernising their path to production. The project centres on building an AI-enabled delivery platform on AWS that reduces friction, enforces consistency, and embeds governance directly into the engineering lifecycle. Join a small team evaluating Coder as a self-hosted cloud development environment: a governed workspace model where source, tooling, builds and AI coding agents run away from the corporate endpoint. The proof of concept runs on AKS, but the production target may be a different cloud, so portability is a requirement of the work.

🎯 The Role

This is the hands-on build engineer working inside an architecture and security control model owned elsewhere: implement the platform, test the controls, and produce decision-grade evidence on developer experience, containment, performance, cost and operational viability.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Coder control plane — build and operate a highly available Coder deployment on AKS, with managed PostgreSQL, provisioner separation where appropriate, and OIDC single sign-on integrated with the identity provider
• Golden-path templates — build one or two production-quality Terraform workspace templates on hardened base images, choosing and evidencing the appropriate dev-container route: Docker-based where permitted, or Envbuilder where a Docker daemon is prohibited
• Connectivity and containment — provide reliable access to source control, package registries, internal APIs and databases while implementing specified controls: Agent Firewall egress allowlisting, default-deny NetworkPolicy, SSH port-forward restrictions, managed secrets and SIEM audit events
• Scale, cost and developer experience — load test against the vendor sizing envelope, tune prebuilds, autostop, dormancy, quotas and warm capacity, and measure cold-start time, responsiveness and access friction with a pilot engineering group
• Portability and evidence — keep the build transferable across cloud platforms and produce clear evidence of what was built, how it behaves, where assumptions remain, and what would be required for production operation
• Operational documentation — produce clear written material covering platform design, implementation choices, control results, operational runbooks, known limitations and recommendations for any production phase

📌 Required Qualifications

• Terraform at production quality — module authorship, composition, versioning, state management, drift handling and maintainable infrastructure code. On this platform, every workspace and template is Terraform-defined
• Managed Kubernetes — AKS or EKS experience, including Pod Security Standards or equivalent admission controls, NetworkPolicy, RBAC, node pools, resource governance, secrets handling and troubleshooting
• Container image engineering — hardened base images, registries, caching, and image builds inside Kubernetes without privileged containers or a mounted Docker socket
• Linux and network troubleshooting — overlay networking, NAT traversal, DNS, HTTP proxy behaviour, TLS, package access, source-control connectivity and remote responsiveness
• Identity integration — OIDC single sign-on, group and role mapping, and ideally SCIM provisioning
• Control implementation — comfortable implementing a control design owned by others, testing it honestly, and reporting plainly when controls do not behave as expected

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Coder or comparable cloud development environments such as GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, Microsoft Dev Box or Daytona
• Dev containers, @devcontainers/cli and Envbuilder-style patterns where no Docker daemon is available
• Container isolation beyond the shared kernel, egress allowlisting, TLS inspection and related control limits
• Load testing, cost engineering, idle reclamation, quota management and production platform operations
• AWS alongside Azure, cloud portability, and regulated environments where controls must be evidenced

🎁 Benefits

• Real flexibility, in practice. We trust you to perform at your best and still have a life outside of work, with genuine hybrid working, a home office budget, an open feedback culture where your voice shapes decisions, and time off when life needs it (birthday included).
• When ClearRoute wins, you win. We offer profit share so success is shared, meaningful recognition for great work, and benefits that look after you and your family, including private healthcare, competitive salary benchmarking, and a confidential employee assistance program covering counselling, mental health support, and financial wellbeing.
• A community you’ll genuinely want to be part of. Interest based communities like running and book clubs, Women in Tech group, monthly socials, and cross regional events bring people together across the company. An inclusive, collaborative culture where you don’t need to conform to succeed, where people support one another and feel comfortable being themselves.
• Where meaningful work meets real growth. You will tackle complex, real world problems at the forefront of platform engineering, AI, security, and scalable systems. Your growth is supported by learning budgets, Udemy access, a clear career framework, internal mobility, and thought leadership opportunities that take your impact beyond ClearRoute.