Platform Technical Lead (OpenShift)

Salary: £36,000 - 76,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven technical leadership of a platform or product engineering team, with accountability for what ships to production.
• Act as a design authority, authoring and maintaining high-quality design records, running design reviews, and holding standards without becoming a bottleneck.
• Treat the platform as a product, understanding consuming teams as customers and deliberately designing and versioning interfaces.
• Structured, analytical approach to complex troubleshooting, including forming hypotheses, isolating variables, resolving unfamiliar incidents, and converting findings into engineering change.
• Communicate technical design and risk with authority to mixed audiences and defend or revise positions based on evidence.
• Translate Tesco Technology and business strategy into a credible technical roadmap, including sequencing, effort, and risk.
• Coach and develop engineers with evidence, validate skill assessments against production work, and build succession so no critical capability rests on one person.
• Work product-first within agile delivery, focusing on outcomes over outputs and honest reporting of technical risk.
• Systematically eliminate toil and treat manual work in the production path as a defect.
• Practical experience designing, building, and operating Red Hat OpenShift at scale in production, including OpenShift Virtualization / KubeVirt across multiple regions or sites.
• Expert-level Kubernetes internals, including scheduling, resource management, RBAC, admission control, CNI networking, CSI storage, and control-plane troubleshooting.
• Experience with hosted control plane architectures (HyperShift / HCP).
• GitOps-based platform delivery in production, including Argo CD or equivalent.
• Multi-cluster fleet management and policy-as-code, including Red Hat ACM or equivalent and Gatekeeper/OPA.
• Infrastructure-as-code and automation in production, plus proficiency in at least one of Go, Python, or Bash.
• API-first platform design, including authoring and versioning APIs consumed by other product teams and managing breaking changes and deprecation.
• Observability engineering using tools such as Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana.
• Experience designing and operating fault-tolerant, highly available, high-throughput distributed systems, including networking and identity integrations.
• CKA/CKS and/or Red Hat certification is a strong advantage.
• Desirable: large-scale VMware-to-OpenShift migration experience.
• Desirable: bare-metal provisioning at scale.
• Desirable: hands-on experience with enterprise and software-defined storage.
• Desirable: platform-level backup and DR for containerised and virtualised workloads, including tested restore.

Responsibilities:

• Act as design authority for the platform, own the technical roadmap, author and ratify Architecture Decision Records, run design reviews, and hold the line on standards.
• Own the target architecture across the full stack, including OpenShift, GitOps delivery, multi-cluster management, observability, networking, storage integration, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Evaluate new technologies against product outcomes by running structured spikes and making adopt, hold, or reject decisions with written rationale.
• Own the platform service interface to consuming product teams, including API and interface contracts, versioning, deprecation discipline, capacity and performance guarantees, and documentation.
• Measure and improve the consumption experience, including integration lead time, breaking-change incidents, and ticket deflection.
• Factor end-to-end developer experience into platform design decisions.
• Own the technical content of the platform product roadmap jointly with the Platform Lead, including the how, effort, sequencing, and technical risk.
• Eliminate toil systematically by automating anything operated more than twice and treating manual work in the production path as a defect.
• Develop and maintain DevOps practices within the Platform Team, ensuring the team owns and supports what it builds.
• Own the platforms operational integrity, including SLOs, error budgets, capacity, and performance.
• Lead technical response on novel or high-severity incidents, own the post-incident review, and convert findings into engineering change.
• Ensure everything shipped is production-grade, designed, documented, tested, observable, and handoff-ready.
• Build resilience so no single person is the sole holder of any critical capability.
• Own the technical development of engineers by validating skill assessments against production evidence, setting stretch assignments, and coaching seniors towards design ownership.
• Represent the platform in cross-team and architecture forums, translating strategy into workable designs and pushing back with evidence where needed.

Technologies:

• API
• Bash
• DevOps
• GitOps
• Grafana
• Kubernetes
• Mobile
• Network
• OpenShift
• Prometheus
• Python
• REST
• RBAC
• VMware
• Ansible
• Ceph
• Support
• LDAP
• Load Balancing
• Veeam

More:

We are Tesco, a supermarket, technology company, and award-winning mobile network with a wider mission to help make every day a little better for our customers, colleagues, and communities. This is a Platform Technical Lead role based in Welwyn Garden City on a hybrid basis, with 60% of the week spent collaborating at our office locations or local sites and the rest remotely. We offer a colleague benefits package that includes an annual bonus scheme of up to 45% of base salary, a car cash allowance, 25 days holiday plus a personal day and bank holidays, private medical insurance, and a retirement savings plan with Tesco contributions. We also offer enhanced family leave, flexible working conversations, and a fully inclusive, accessible recruitment process as an accredited Disability Confident Leader.

last updated 39 week of 2026