Platform Engineer - £475 per day Inside IR35 - Leeds

Platform Engineer
Contract | Inside IR35

Location: Leeds (2 days per week onsite)
Day Rate: £475/day
Start Date: ASAP
End Date: 4 months (until mid-August 2026)
Clearance: BPSS required; eligibility for SC clearance essential (to be obtained after project start)

Overview
Exalto Consulting is supporting a large public sector digital programme focused on modernising identity and access management for critical healthcare services in England.

This role sits within a team responsible for a nationally significant platform used by health and care professionals. The programme is transitioning from Legacy methods to a more flexible, Internet-enabled approach to improve accessibility, resilience and user experience across systems.

You will join a multidisciplinary engineering team working on a platform that underpins access to essential services. The work is high-impact, with a strong emphasis on reliability, security and continuous improvement.

The Role
As a Platform Engineer, you will contribute to the ongoing development and operation of a high-availability identity platform supporting critical national infrastructure.

You will work closely with product, engineering and delivery teams to enhance platform capabilities, address technical challenges and improve the overall engineering environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Support the operation and maintenance of a highly available authentication platform
• Investigate and resolve high-priority incidents in a timely and structured way
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Business Analysts and Technical Leads to refine and deliver new features
• Contribute to planning, estimation and implementation of roadmap items
• Work with engineering teams to reduce technical debt and improve system sustainability
• Help improve DevOps practices, tooling and delivery pipelines
• Ensure solutions meet appropriate standards for security, performance and reliability

• Strong experience in Java development within enterprise environments
• Experience working on secure, high-availability or regulated systems
• Familiarity with identity and access management concepts or authentication platforms
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams

• IAM/Directory Technologies: PingDS, PingIDM
• Languages: Java, Python
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server
• Testing & Performance: Gatling (Scala), Karate, Playwright
• CI/CD & Tooling: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Maven, Artifactory
• Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS/Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Networking/Platform: HAProxy, containerisation (Docker)

• Hybrid working model with 2 days per week onsite in Leeds
• Collaborative, multidisciplinary team environment
• Focus on delivering reliable, user-centred services at national scale