Senior Platform Engineer

Job summary

ROLE SYNOPSIS:

Technology and software specialists providing innovative, custom built or customized software and technical platforms to BP colleagues and external users. Primary activities will be in the development, customization, testing and support of IT applications and platforms, as well as contribution to technical designs. You will develop and test software with a focus on software defined infrastructure, creating automated processes for the software manufacturing lifecycle which may be full CI/CD pipelines or sub-components for build and deployment depending on the platform technology in use.

You will be part of bp’s Data & Analytics Platform organisation, the group responsible for the platforms and services that underpin bp’s data supply chain. The portfolio covers technologies that support the life cycle of critical data products in bp, bringing together data producers and consumers through enablement and industrial scale operations of data ingestion, processing, storage and publishing, including data visualisation, advanced analytics, data science and data discovery platforms.

For this role specifically, you will be a part of the Knowledge & Data Stores team, focused on knowledge management and mining. This is an exciting opportunity to innovate and reimagine how we share knowledge with our employees and enable greater levels of productivity. This will involve designing and delivering the necessary knowledge platform to collect and process unstructured data in order to provide visibility and insights to our end users. The ultimate objective is to create a knowledge sharing system which would allow easy federation of multiple existing knowledge sources, without having to rebuild them.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Team: You will be responsible for building and operating our strategic data platforms, including the setup, configuration and monitoring of data ingestion services. You will be hands-on in designing, planning, implementing, maintaining and documenting reliable and scalable data infrastructure and data products in complex environments.
• Platforms: Create a clear vision and maximize value from current applications and emerging technologies, demonstrating technical thought leadership in your business
• Relationships: Continuous improvement of the wider IT&S team by supporting and coaching Platform Engineers and proactively improving the quality standards and efficiency of delivery.
• Technology: You will build awareness of internal and external technology developments, managing the delivery of process and improvements, identifying and implementing continuous improvement plans for Platform Engineering

• Preferably a Bachelor's (or higher) degree, preferably Computer Science, MIS/IT, Mathematics/ hard science.

• Platform Development & Operations: Develop, maintain and continually improve knowledge platform with advanced tools, knowledge content, taxonomy and organization. Work on processes for managing and use of knowledge. Design and develop large knowledge base and help create expert system to support AI capabilities.
• Technical Specialism: Adept in the area of data mining and data discovery. You need to be an expert in AI language and knowledge representation who investigates a particular problem
• Availability Management: Contributes to the availability management process and its operation
• Capacity Management: Monitors service component capacity and initiates actions to resolve any shortfalls
• Methods and Tools
• Programming / Software Development: Designs, codes, tests, corrects and documents complex programs and scripts from agreed specifications, and subsequent iterations, using agreed standards and tools, to achieve a well engineered result.
• Release and Deployment: Assesses and analyses release components. Provides inputs. Carries out the builds and tests in coordination with testers and component specialists maintaining and administering the tools and methods – manual or automatic - and ensuring, where possible, information exchange with configuration management.
• Systems Design: Specifies user/system interfaces, and translates logical designs into physical designs taking account of target environment, performance requirements and existing systems. - Produces detailed designs and documents all work using required standards, methods and tools, including prototyping tools, physical data flows, file layouts, common routines and utilities, program specifications or prototypes and backup, recovery and restart procedures where appropriate
• Systems Installation and Decommissioning: installs or removes hardware and/or software, using supplied installation instructions and tools including, where appropriate, handover to the client. Conducts tests, corrects malfunctions, and documents results in accordance with agreed procedures. Reports details of all hardware/software items that have been installed and removed so that configuration management records can be updated.

• Hands-on experience designing, planning, implementing, maintaining and documenting reliable and scalable data infrastructure and data products
• Extensive experience in handling/extracting information from unstructured content.
• Expertise on Microsoft’s Azure platform – experience on the advanced cognitive services.
• Development experience in one or more object-oriented programming languages ( Python, Go, Java, C++)
• Exposure to adjacent domains such as platforms, storage, databases, etc.
• Knowledge of graph technologies
• Good knowledge of modern development methodologies (Agile using Scrum and/or Kanban)