Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

Springer Nature is one of the world’s leading global research, educational and professional publishers. With more than 170 years of combined history, we are home to an array of respected and trusted brands and imprints, providing quality content through innovative products and services. Every day, our imprints, books, journals, and resources reach millions, helping researchers and scientists discover, students learn, and professionals achieve their goals. The company employs around 10,000 staff in over 50 countries.

We are seeking an experienced Platform Engineer (m/f/d) to help us shape, build, and improve our unified platforms and their integrated capabilities. This role enables Springer Nature’s product teams to focus on delivering value more efficiently.

About Engineering Enablement at Springer Nature

The Engineering Enablement department comprises approximately 60 individuals, organized into teams that collaborate closely to fulfill our mission. Within Springer Nature Technology, we specialize in core expertise areas including PaaS, Databases, Observability, Cloud, and Release Engineering. You will join a multidisciplinary team representing diverse nationalities, backgrounds, and experience levels. While we operate as a highly distributed department, we sometimes travel for in-person collaboration. Our main locations are London, Dordrecht, Berlin, and Lisbon, supporting a global presence.

Our Technology Landscape

We have developed platforms serving hundreds of developers worldwide at scale. Our technology stack increasingly leverages Kubernetes as a backend container platform, which we are integrating into our platform offering. We are harnessing the power of Kubernetes to build a new PaaS that will coexist with our current Cloud Foundry Platform. Additionally, we manage an internal database platform overseeing more than 1,200 database servers.

Your Role and Responsibilities

Working collaboratively with your team, you will be responsible for developing and enhancing our platforms. This includes maintenance tasks, thorough documentation, executing updates, and ensuring system security. As a department, we are committed to providing a unified and standardized platform by adopting modern and open standards. Our unified platform approach is built around core capabilities such as observability, continuous integration, security, and storage. Therefore, we collaborate closely within our department to tightly integrate these core capabilities, ensuring product teams across Springer Nature benefit from a cohesive experience.

This specific role is situated within the Database Engineering team, which is dedicated to maintaining, developing, and scaling our managed database capabilities. Your initial focus will be on strengthening our database infrastructure platform, offering you the opportunity to tackle new challenges and drive the platform's evolution alongside the team.

Core Technologies Used

• Terraform, Ansible
• Postgres, Mongo, MySQL
• GCP, AWS
• Docker
• Concourse, GitHub Actions
• Grafana, LGTM stack, Sentry, Open Telemetry
• Cloud Foundry
• Kubernetes, Kubevela, GKE

About You: Candidate Profile

You are a friendly and modest team member, humble and open to learning from anyone, regardless of age, gender, race, role, or experience. You value social interactions, embrace feedback, and are capable of introspection. Confident in your abilities, you are also aware of your limitations. You possess a strong preference for collaborative work, cross-domain and cross-practice collaboration, knowledge sharing, and mentoring others. You understand the importance of delivering meaningful and sustainable solutions over temporary fixes to meet arbitrary deadlines.

Essential Skills and Experience

• Experience in operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure at scale
• Programming experience with Golang, Ruby, Python, or at least one modern language
• Experience in contributing to the architecture and design of new and existing systems
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Experience with automation frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Puppet, or Ansible)
• Knowledge of Observability practices (centralized monitoring and telemetry)
• Familiarity with Docker and containerization
• Ability to work in a team context with a focus on collaboration and shared ownership

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Familiarity with Database technologies and/or running Databases at scale
• Written and maintained Rest APIs or web applications
• Took a project through the full software lifecycle from early designs to production deployments
• Managed production Kubernetes resources and deployments using tools and languages like Kubectl, Helm, or Terraform

The Application Process

We look forward to receiving your application. After reviewing your CV, our Talent Acquisition team will contact you to schedule a short initial phone/video call. Following this first step, we will conduct 2-3 rounds (introductory, technical, cultural) with you – all involving different members of the Engineering Enablement team. When appropriate, these phases will be held via phone/video calls.

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Infrastructure
• Database Management
• Containerization
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Automation
• Observability
• System Security
• Platform Development
• Engineering Enablement
• Collaboration
• Kubernetes