Senior Platform Engineer (SDEIII)

Tesco Hungary  •  Full-Time  •  Working hours 40  •  Apply by 30-Sep-2026 About the role Our platform handles over 100 billion requests per month at five-nines uptime. We operate the critical path for connectivity across Tesco—securing external ingress, managing thousands of internal APIs, and proxying Store-to-Cloud traffic originating from 50,000+ tills and devices across Europe.

Built on an Envoy control plane and a massive, highly distributed data plane, we are a pure engineering team. You will design, build, and operate this infrastructure, owning reliability outcomes end-to-end and driving the technical strategy of the platform.

We run a unified engineering model. There is no wall between dev and ops; you will rotate between building platform capabilities and running SRE streams to maintain deep context across the system.

You will work closely with our London-based team. We default to pairing for complex system design, production debugging, and incident response because it improves quality and spreads context. We work three days a week from the Budapest office to support whiteboarding and deep technical work.

This is not a standard web-routing problem. You are engineering a massive Envoy-based distributed data plane that bridges 50,000+ external endpoints and thousands of internal APIs at extreme throughput. The role offers real production ownership, complex distributed systems challenges, and the autonomy to shape how a rapidly growing engineering hub operates.

What is in it for you Tesco is a diverse and exciting employer, dedicated to being #aplacetogeton, providing career-defining opportunities to all of our colleagues. If you chose to join our business, we will provide you with:   

• Permanent contract from the go – as a sign of our trust in your abilities 
• Yearly salary bonus – based on both individual and business performance 
• Extensive private healthcare - complex care package including a wide range of specialists, medical services, and free flu vaccination 
• Cafeteria  
• Relocation Help - professional service to secure relevant working permits and other necessary documents 
• Learning opportunities - certified technical training and learning platforms like Udemy, Pluralsight, and O'Reilly 
• Referral Bonus 
• Learning culture and excellent opportunities to develop your career within your chosen field or something altogether new 
• Varied and exciting projects to play a part in – there is always something new and exciting in the pipeline 

  If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you.  You will be responsible for - Architect resilient traffic controls across three primary domains: Store-to-Cloud proxying, East-West routing via our Envoy control and data planes, and North-South ingress.
- Evolve the platform for AI by integrating emerging Agent-to-Agent and MCP traffic patterns into our core routing, policy, and observability stack.
- Drive reliability through code, utilizing SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets to balance release velocity with systemic stability.
- Eliminate toil by building self-service APIs and automation that act as paved roads for hundreds of product engineering teams.
- Lead incident response, participating in a sustainable two-person weekly rotation. You will drive rigorous post-incident reviews that result in structural system improvements, not just quick fixes.

You will need We index on strong engineering judgement and production experience over a specific checklist of tools. You will be a strong fit if you bring:

- Production Ownership: A background in Platform Engineering or SRE, operating mission-critical distributed systems where downtime has immediate business impact.
- L7 Traffic Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with API gateways, reverse proxies, or control plane/data plane architectures (especially Envoy), and a deep understanding of load balancing, rate limiting, and failure domains.
- Operational Maturity: Experience managing high-stakes incidents, building sustainable on-call practices, and using data to make pragmatic engineering trade-offs.
- Systems Engineering: Strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, cloud-n