Platform Engineer

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim 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.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

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 adjustments@depop.com.

Platform Engineer

Job Description

Role

The Platform Core team owns and operates the AWS cloud environment the business relies on. The team sets the paved paths for Terraform and IaC (infrastructure as code), CI/CD, Edge using Cloudflare and the VPN running on Appgate.

As an engineer on this team, you’ll be working on building for scale at a rapid pace, while driving improvements that help the wider engineering organisation ship faster and safer. You'll move fast, make real architectural decisions, and have genuine ownership. This isn't a ticket-closing role - you'll shape how we build and operate our platform.

Day to day, that means managing our infrastructure, helping other engineers move fast and self-serve, working on an ever-evolving threat on our CDN, and ensuring system health. You'd be hands-on with infrastructure-as-code, Cloudflare services, automation languages (python, golang), whilst also thinking about how your work reduces friction for the engineers who depend on the platform every day, and using various AI tools to move fast.

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, and developer sentiment, not just uptime.

Responsibilities

• Empower and Mentor Developers: Empower developers to take ownership of the operation, performance, and availability of our services, providing guidance and mentorship as needed.
• Innovative Software Solutions: Design, write, and deliver software that enhances the lives of our engineers, improves scalability, and drives platform innovation.
• Cloud Infrastructure Excellence: Define, secure, and optimize the cloud infrastructure that supports our platform, ensuring high availability and performance.
• On-Call Participation: Take part in our on-call rota, providing critical support and ensuring service reliability.
• Edge Security Posture: Define, drive and build a strong edge networking posture for our domains.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive a culture of continuous improvement—measure, automate, and iterate on processes and systems.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including developers, platform engineers, and security experts, to align infrastructure with company goals and support seamless development and deployment of applications.
• Security and Compliance: Adhere to and promote security best practices and compliance standards across all infrastructure and processes.

Qualifications

Technical

• Experience with Cloud, (AWS preferred) with defining, securing, and optimising cloud infrastructure that supports our platform, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Good working knowledge of Continuous Integration/Deployment tools and practices.
• Appreciation of distributed systems.
• Care about writing clean, well-composed, and tested code.
• Skilled in at least one language (ideally Python or Golang) and scripting (bash).
• Knowledge of network infrastructure design.
• Experience consuming RESTful web services.
• A passion for security, reliability and scalability of deliverables.

Non-Technical

• Work with a product mindset: caring about user outcomes and making data-driven decisions.
• Self-motivated and able to deliver consistent results through problem-solving.
• Demonstrates a good approach to continuous learning and improvement.
• Able to effectively prioritise competing demands.
• Be adaptable to a dynamic working environment.
• Continuously evaluate the team’s ways of working and contribute to its improvement and automation.

Desirable

• An understanding of operating Postgres or another major RDBMS at scale.
• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with a CDN provider and WAF (Cloudflare, Fastly).
• Experience with other major HashiCorp projects (Vault).
• Knowledge of modern Linux systems internals (kernel, filesystems, network stack, systemd).
• Mentoring experience.

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!