Contributing to the architecture of Rowden's 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.

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 don't.
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 (Desirable).
Experience with edge-oriented operating systems, hypervisors, or device-management platforms (Desirable).
Linux internals knowledge and the practicalities of running it on constrained hardware (Desirable).
Experience with mesh, overlay, or software-defined networking integrated at the platform layer (Desirable).

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!

Principal Platform Engineer – Edge

Key skills