Principal Platform Engineer (Edge)

We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 160 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe's fastest-growing engineering businesses.

We're looking for a Principal Platform Engineer who is motivated by hard distributed systems problems and the realities of operating software at the edge. You are comfortable designing platforms that cannot assume stable connectivity, consistent cluster membership, or a persistent central control plane, and you understand why conventional orchestration approaches often break down in constrained, fragmented, or disrupted environments.

You will have strong experience building and operating containerised platforms, orchestration systems, or distributed infrastructure. You may have worked with Kubernetes or related technologies, but you will also recognise where centralised, control-plane-driven models are the wrong fit. You are interested in approaches based on declarative workload intent, local orchestration decisions, peer coordination, and systems that can operate independently during disconnection.

You are the sort of engineer who thinks carefully about failure modes, deployment risk, observability, workload lifecycle, service discovery, and operational simplicity. You care about building robust abstractions that allow application teams to securely deploy workloads without needing to understand the underlying orchestration model. You are equally comfortable writing production code, shaping architecture, setting engineering standards, and working with other experienced engineers to turn an emerging technical concept into a reliable platform capability.

This role will suit someone who wants to remain hands-on, make pragmatic technical decisions, and build infrastructure for environments where disconnection, disruption, and constrained resources are normal operating conditions.

This role offers hybrid working with a minimum of 3 days per week on-site at our Bristol HQ.

For senior roles, compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. Because that can vary significantly, we do not always publish a fixed salary band. We will, however, discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time. 

More information about security clearance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels