Platform Director - #2172812

Director of Platform Operations | Remote | £150,000 – £160,000

Are you a senior reliability and security leader who wants to own the operational backbone of an entire software product suite?

We’re looking for a Director of Platform Operations to bring Site Reliability Engineering and Security Engineering together under single accountable leadership at a fast-growing education technology business. This is a high-impact, director-level role where you’ll shape how a suite of products stays secure, available and easy to build on, while contributing to engineering strategy at the highest level.

Combining operational leadership, technical credibility and a genuine passion for enabling engineers, you’ll take practices that are strong in one product today and scale them consistently across the whole estate, including newly acquired businesses.

The Role

You’ll own the strategy and outcomes for SRE and security across every product line, working alongside the VP Platform and senior engineering leaders. You’ll standardise how incidents are managed and how security is reported, and define how SRE partners with development teams so engineers can take real ownership of what they build and run.

With the business exploring where AI can improve operational work, you’ll also help determine what to automate, what to augment and where human accountability must remain.

This is a senior leadership position for someone comfortable leading managers and teams, with enough technical depth to engage credibly with engineers and stay close to the detail where it matters.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own the availability commitment (99.9% SLA) and define the SLO and error-budget framework that makes reliability measurable and actionable.
• Build the reliability discipline: observability, capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing and toil reduction.
• Standardise incident management, problem management and reporting across the product suite.
• Own the vulnerability management framework, from triage to remediation SLAs, with clear reporting to executive and board level.
• Embed security into engineering workflows through automated scanning, secure-by-default patterns and practical enablement.
• Lead the move to "build it, run it", helping product teams take production ownership through a staged, evidenced adoption path rather than a mandate.
• Deliver golden paths, self-service tooling and CI/CD that make the right thing the easy thing for engineers.
• Support acquired businesses as they adopt your security, SRE and developer experience practices.
• Explore and test practical uses of AI in operational workflows.
• Build, coach and hold to account a strong leadership layer across the function.

Essential Experience

• Proven leadership of a genuine SRE function, not an operations team using the name, with accountability for availability against a defined SLA in a customer-facing SaaS environment.
• Credible security experience, including vulnerability management at scale, remediation SLAs and reporting to executive or board level.
• Experience managing managers and operating at scale across multiple teams.
• Deep, practical command of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, observability and problem management.
• Ownership of a major incident management process, including incident command, on-call design and blameless reviews, with evidence of improving MTTR.
• Strong technical credibility across cloud platforms (AWS, with exposure to GCP or Azure) and infrastructure as code such as Terraform.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills at executive level, including during live incidents.
• Comfortable in an autonomous, fast-paced, light-process environment, with enough technical depth for around 10% hands-on contribution.

Desirable Experience

• Experience leading a shift to build-it-run-it in an organisation that previously centralised operations.
• Experience of internal developer platform or platform-as-a-product models.
• Practical exposure to AIOps or AI-assisted incident tooling.
• Experience in SaaS or data-sensitive / regulated domain, including ISO 27001, SOC 2 or Cyber Essentials Plus.
• Experience running a multi-product, multi-market estate on shared platform foundations.
• Familiarity with PHP estates, Docker and FinOps.

About You

You’re an effective, collaborative leader who can move between board-level conversations and technical detail. You deliver outcomes through influence as well as authority, and you hold peers and teams to account constructively.

You’re commercially aware, comfortable working with limited resource and high volumes of work, and clear-eyed about trade-offs between risk, speed and cost. You build leaders, handle performance robustly and measure success by the reliability, security and developer outcomes your organisation achieves.

Why Apply?

• Suite-wide ownership: Shape SRE, security and developer experience across the products suite.
• Strategic influence: Contribute to engineering strategy at the highest level.
• AI in operations: Help determine where AI adds real value to operational work.
• Growth and change: Support acquired businesses and international expansion.
• Meaningful impact: Improve the reliability and security of software that organisations rely on every day.
• Remote working: Work remotely in a director-level role.

If you’re ready to lead platform operations at scale, we’d love to hear from you. Apply now with a CV to Dominic Brown on [email protected] or get in touch for a confidential discussion about the opportunity.

Director of Platform Operations | Remote | £150,000 – £160,000