Principal Platform Engineer (Edge)

• Contributing to the architecture of Rowdens 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 dont.
• 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: Youre excited by building not by delegating.
• Curious & Adaptive: You continuously learn and youre comfortable working in spaces where the right answer isnt 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