Platform Engineer

Company Description

Depop is the community-powered circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover desirable secondhand fashion. With a community of over 35 million users, Depop is on a mission to make fashion circular, redefining fashion consumption. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Manchester, and in 2021 became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy. Find out more at www.depop.com 

Our mission is to make fashion circular and to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected]. For any other non-disability related questions, please reach out to our Talent Partners.

Role

The Platform Applications team owns and operates the infrastructure that almost every product engineering team at Depop builds on - Kubernetes (EKS), the Linkerd service mesh, CI/CD pipelines, container patterns/practices, and observability stewardship via Datadog.

As an engineer on this team, you'd be working to keep Depop's ~300 microservices running reliably while driving improvements that help the wider engineering organisation ship faster and safer. 

Day to day, that means managing EKS cluster upgrades, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, hardening container images, maintaining self-hosted infrastructure, and improving the deployment toolchain.

You'd be hands-on with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Crossplane), Karpenter autoscaling, and Kubernetes internals, whilst also thinking about how your work reduces friction for the engineers who depend on the platform every day. 

The role blends deep infrastructure expertise with a product mindset - the team's "customers" are internal engineers, and success is measured by pipeline reliability, deployment speed, developer sentiment, and vulnerability reduction, not just uptime.

Responsibilities

Kubernetes (EKS)                

  - Cluster management, upgrades, and lifecycle across all environments (dev, staging, prod, ops)                                               

  - Node group configuration and autoscaling via Karpenter                                                                                      

  - Disaster recovery planning for Kubernetes workloads

 CI/CD

  - Owning the "how code gets to production" path

  - Owning the “how database schemas are updated” path

  - Maintaining Jenkins pipelines (legacy) and building GitHub Actions workflows (migration target)

  - Self-hosted runner fleet management (ARC runner scale sets on EKS)

  - Pipeline optimisation - speed, reliability, failure rate reduction

  - Building robust CI/CD for future business scale

 Containerisation

  - ECR container registry - lifecycle policies, access controls, vulnerability scanning

  - Secure-by-default base images - reducing supply chain risk and vulnerability counts

  - Container image build and publish workflows

 Observability Stewardship (Datadog)

  - Setting observability standards - naming conventions, tagging, dashboard structure

  - Cost management and optimisation

  - Onboarding support for teams adopting Datadog features

  - Maintaining shared dashboards and monitors for platform health

  - Building best-in-class observability patterns

 Infrastructure as Code & GitOps

  - Terraform for infrastructure provisioning

  - Crossplane for GitOps-based GitHub repository management

  - Maintaining compliance guardrails across the repository estate

 Platform Reliability

  - Monitoring and responding to platform-level issues (ingress, runners, mesh, clusters)

  - BAU maintenance - patching, upgrades, security remediations

  - Supporting ~300 microservices and ~11,600 production deployments per period at 100% success rate

 Supporting the Wider Org

  - Ad hoc SME support for product engineering teams

  - Collaborating with our other platform teams to maintain alignment with our Platform Strategy

Requirements

Required                                              

  - Strong experience with Kubernetes in production - cluster operations, troubleshooting, resource management, autoscaling                     

  - Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, ECR, RDS, EBS) or equivalent cloud provider at scale                                           

  - Solid Infrastructure as Code skills - Terraform in particular

  - Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar)

  - Comfortable with containerisation - Docker, image builds, registry management, supply chain security concepts

  - Strong understanding of networking fundamentals - DNS, load balancing, TLS, ingress, service discovery

  - Experience with observability tooling - metrics, logs, traces, alerting (Datadog preferred but Prometheus/Grafana/similar acceptable)

  - Proficient in at least one scripting/automation language (Python, Go, Bash)

  - Comfortable working in a Linux environment

  - Experience operating infrastructure supporting microservices architectures

  - Strong debugging and incident response skills - able to diagnose issues across distributed systems under pressure

Preferred

  - Experience with Linkerd or similar service mesh (Istio, Cilium)

  - Experience with Karpenter or other Kubernetes autoscaling solutions (Cluster Autoscaler, KEDA)

  - Familiarity with Helm for Kubernetes package management

  - Experience with GitOps workflows (Crossplane, ArgoCD, Flux)

  - Exposure to Backstage or other internal developer portals

  - Experience with hardened container image solutions

  - Understanding of compliance and security in a CI/CD context - OIDC, IAM roles, branch protection, audit logging

  - Experience managing self-hosted CI/CD runners at scale

  - Familiarity with the Scala or Node.js/TypeScript build ecosystems (as a consumer, not necessarily a developer)

  - Experience with incident management tooling and on-call practices

  - Exposure to developer experience as a discipline - thinking about internal engineers as your users

Qualities

  - Product mindset applied to infrastructure - thinks about the engineer experience, not just the system

  - Comfortable balancing BAU maintenance with longer-term strategic work

  - Able to communicate technical decisions clearly to non-platform engineers

  - Pragmatic approach to trade-offs - knows when "good enough" beats "perfect"

  - Comfortable working across a broad surface area rather than deep in one niche

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa

• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space

• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative

• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support

• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days

• 1 company-wide day off per quarter

• Impact hours: Up to 2 days additional paid leave per year for volunteering

• Fully paid 4 week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.

• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office Based, and Remote options *role dependant

• All offices are dog-friendly

• Ability to work abroad for 4 weeks per year in UK tax treaty countries

Family Life:

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees

• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions, and more

• Mentorship and programmes to upskill employees

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)

• Pension matching up to 6% of qualifying earnings

Depop Extras:

• Employees enjoy free shipping on their Depop sales within the UK.

• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!