AI Native Founding Product and Platform Engineer

Job description

We're reimagining a legacy system from the ground up. As the Founding Product & Platform Engineer, you'll define the architecture, tooling, engineering culture and development practices behind the next generation of SGS digital products. You'll be equally comfortable designing distributed systems, building customer-facing experiences, creating cloud platforms and writing production code. This is not a traditional architect role.

We are looking for a builder. You'll lead by example, making key technical decisions through hands-on delivery rather than governance. You'll help create the products that drive business impact while establishing the platform capabilities, reusable services and engineering standards that allow a small team to deliver at scale. If you're excited by greenfield environments, ambiguity, ownership and the opportunity to shape something from day one, we'd love to hear from you.

The Mission Your dual mission is to: Build exceptional digital products: Lead the architecture and delivery of our most ambitious customer-facing solutions, owning everything from frontend experiences to backend services and cloud infrastructure.

Build the engineering platform behind them

Create the tooling, deployment pathways and reusable building blocks that allow engineers to move quickly, safely and independently. As successful patterns emerge, you'll transform them into shared capabilities that accelerate delivery across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

Lead by Building: Act as the technical lead on our most important initiatives, architecting through code and setting the standard for engineering excellence.

Own the Full Stack

Design and develop solutions across frontend, backend, cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines.

Build the Paved Road

Shape our platform (CI/CD, Kubernetes, IaC, observability) so other engineers ship faster and more safely.

Turn Solutions into Reusable Capabilities

Identify successful patterns and convert them into shared services, frameworks, libraries and architectural standards Multiply Velocity: Continuously remove friction from the development lifecycle through automation, standardisation and thoughtful platform design.

Mentor and Influence

Partner with engineers, product leads and designers to raise technical standards and encourage a culture of pragmatic, high-quality delivery.

Qualifications

What we’re looking for

Full Stack Mastery: Expert-level React/TypeScript on the frontend, and deep experience building distributed backends in Go, Python, or TypeScript.

Cloud & IaC

Hands-on, architectural-level experience with a major cloud (GCP, AWS) and Terraform. You don’t just use it; you architect with it.

Containers & CI/CD

Strong knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD pipelines built from scratch (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).

Systems Thinking

Proven ability to design scalable, resilient and observable systems.

Product Mindset

Experience working closely with Product and Design teams to deliver solutions that users genuinely value.

Observability & Quality

Practical understanding of monitoring, tracing, testing and operational excellence, including tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger.

Who You Are

You have 10+ years of experience, with strong backgrounds in both product engineering and platform/SRE work. You are a builder first. You don’t run architecture review boards; you write the code that makes them unnecessary. You believe the best architecture is the simplest one that works, and that great products and great platforms are built by the same kind of mindset. You measure your success by the velocity, autonomy, and pride of the engineers around you.