Head of Platform Engineering

About the Role

Our client is looking for a Head of Platform Engineering to take full ownership of the company’s infrastructure and platform function.

You will lead an established team of four engineers — three DevOps Engineers and one SRE — and work closely with the CTO and Engineering Leads across the organization.

The infrastructure function is currently overseen by an interim, part-time Head of Infrastructure. The new Head of Platform Engineering will become the permanent owner of the function, define its long-term direction, and lead its next stage of development.

The role sits at the intersection of infrastructure reliability, developer experience, security, automation, and engineering efficiency.

You will inherit an existing cloud environment supporting approximately 15 products and multiple engineering teams. Your responsibility will be to introduce greater consistency, visibility, scalability, and operational maturity across the platform.

This is a technically strong leadership role. You will not be expected to personally handle routine operational work, but you should remain close enough to the technology to guide architecture, review critical decisions, challenge assumptions, and support the team with complex infrastructure and production issues when needed.

What You’ll Do

Platform Strategy and Ownership

• Take full ownership of the company’s platform and infrastructure function.
• Define and execute the platform engineering strategy in partnership with the CTO .
• Assess the current infrastructure landscape and develop a prioritized roadmap for reliability, scalability, security, automation, developer experience, and cloud efficiency.
• Present and align the platform roadmap with the CTO and Engineering Leads within the first 90 days .
• Translate business and product priorities into clear platform investments and technical decisions.
• Define long-term standards for cloud infrastructure, deployment, observability, security, and environment management.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries, service expectations, and operating principles for the Platform function.
• Define and track platform KPIs, including uptime, MTTR , deployment frequency, delivery reliability, and cloud cost efficiency.

Infrastructure and Platform Engineering

• Own the evolution of the company’s AWS infrastructure, CI/CD ecosystem, observability, security, and deployment practices.
• Standardize CI/CD pipelines , Infrastructure as Code , deployment workflows, and environment management across engineering teams.
• Develop reusable platform components and self-service capabilities that reduce manual work and improve developer productivity.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of production environments.
• Establish and evolve infrastructure security practices, including least-privilege access, IAM/RBAC , secrets management, vulnerability management, and secure deployment standards.
• Strengthen monitoring, logging, alerting, and tracing across the platform.
• Improve incident response, on-call, postmortem, backup, and disaster recovery practices.
• Partner with product engineering teams to remove platform bottlenecks and improve the speed and safety of software delivery.

Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop the existing team of three DevOps Engineers and one SRE .
• Set clear responsibilities, expectations, and development plans for team members.
• Build a strong technical culture based on ownership, documentation, measurable outcomes, and continuous improvement.
• Hire additional platform engineers as the function grows.
• Balance strategic platform initiatives with operational priorities.
• Ensure the team is focused on the highest-impact infrastructure and platform improvements.
• Create effective collaboration between Platform, Product Engineering, Security, and Engineering Leadership.
• Own performance management and support the professional development of the team.

Cloud Economics and Technology Decisions

• Own platform-related budgeting, including cloud spend, infrastructure tooling, and vendor relationships.
• Improve visibility into cloud usage and infrastructure costs across products and teams.
• Identify and execute cost optimization opportunities without compromising reliability, security, or developer productivity.
• Evaluate new platform technologies based on measurable engineering and business value.
• Introduce practical automation and AI-assisted workflows where they can improve platform operations, documentation, incident response, or engineering productivity.

What We’re Looking For

Must-Have Experience

• 7+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, or a related field.
• 2+ years leading a Platform, Infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE function.
• Proven experience managing and developing a team of platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE engineers.
• Strong production experience with AWS and a deep understanding of cloud architecture, networking, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes and Docker .
• Strong experience designing, building, and improving CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions , GitLab CI , ArgoCD , or similar tools.
• Production-scale Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform or Pulumi .
• Experience with IAM , RBAC , secrets management, vulnerability management, and infrastructure security practices.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus , Grafana , Datadog , or equivalent tools.
• Experience supporting multiple engineering teams, products, or production environments within a SaaS or digital product organization.
• Proven ability to introduce technical standards, improve engineering efficiency, and influence infrastructure decisions across teams.
• Experience owning or contributing to platform roadmaps, technical strategy, and infrastructure budgets.
• Experience working in a remote-first or distributed engineering organization.
• Strong documentation and asynchronous communication skills.
• English at B2 level or above.
• Based in Europe and able to collaborate effectively across European time zones.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in a multi-product, portfolio, venture-builder, or high-growth technology company.
• Experience supporting an engineering organization of approximately 40–100 engineers .
• Additional production experience with GCP or Azure .
• FinOps experience, including cloud cost analysis, optimization, forecasting, and budget management.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure capabilities.
• Experience introducing AI-assisted engineering tools , LLM-based automation , Copilot , or engineering agents.
• Python , Go , or Bash scripting experience.
• Knowledge of the DORA metrics framework.
• AWS , GCP , FinOps , or Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification.
• Deep expertise in tools such as ArgoCD , HashiCorp Vault , Prometheus , Grafana , or related platform technologies.
• Open-source contributions related to cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering.

What Our Client Offers

• Competitive compensation aligned with the seniority and scope of the role.
• Fully remote work from anywhere in Europe.
• Flexible working hours within a distributed, remote-first environment.
• 22 paid vacation days plus local public holidays.
• Direct collaboration with the CTO and senior engineering leadership.
• An established Platform/DevOps team of four engineers .
• The opportunity to take full ownership of an existing infrastructure function and define its next stage of development.
• A meaningful technical scope supporting approximately 15 products and 40–50 engineers .
• A modern cloud and platform engineering environment using contemporary technologies and practices.
• A high level of autonomy in defining platform priorities, standards, and ways of working.
• The opportunity to influence infrastructure architecture, developer experience, reliability, security, automation, and cloud efficiency across the organization.
• A collaborative, product-focused culture with an emphasis on ownership, documentation, and practical decision-making.

What Success Looks Like

During the first months, you will develop a clear understanding of the current platform landscape, team capabilities, engineering workflows, infrastructure risks, incident processes, and cloud spending.

You will align with the CTO and Engineering Leads on the highest-priority platform initiatives and establish a clear roadmap with measurable outcomes.

Over time:

• Engineering teams should be able to deliver changes faster and more reliably.
• Infrastructure and deployment practices should become more consistent across products.
• Platform ownership and service expectations should become clearer.
• Incident response and on-call practices should become more resilient and scalable.
• The company should gain greater visibility into reliability, security, and cloud costs.
• The Platform function should evolve from a primarily operational capability into a strategic engineering function that enables product teams and supports continued business growth.