Head of Platform Engineering

Job title: Head of Platform Engineering

Office location: Spanskih boraca, Belgrade - Hybrid working (3 days in the office)

About the role and the Team: 

We're looking for an experienced and highly skilled Head of Platform Engineering to lead our Platform Engineering function and shape the strategic direction of our platform infrastructure. This is a pivotal leadership role, responsible for building and evolving a scalable, secure and reliable technology platform that enables our engineering teams to deliver software quickly and effectively.

You'll lead a team of approximately 20 internal and external engineers, providing technical direction, developing engineering capability and creating a high-performing, collaborative culture.

You'll bring strong experience across DevOps, cloud-native technologies and modern platform engineering, with hands-on knowledge of AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, Terraform and Ansible. Just as importantly, you'll understand how to build platforms that make life easier for product engineering teams through automation, self-service and robust developer tooling.

What will you be doing?

Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team

• Lead, mentor and develop a team of around 20 internal and external engineers.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive and high-performing engineering culture.
• Manage resources, priorities, delivery timelines and performance.
• Develop engineering capability and ensure the team has the skills and support required to succeed.

Shape and evolve our platform

• Oversee the design, development and ongoing operation of scalable, secure and highly reliable platform infrastructure.
• Establish and champion modern Platform Engineering and DevOps practices.
• Drive the adoption and effective use of Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform and Ansible.
• Lead the continued adoption and evolution of Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Build centralised tooling, automation and self-service capabilities that enable product engineering teams to work more efficiently.
• Ensure platform services are resilient, observable and designed with scalability and reliability in mind.

Lead our cloud strategy

• Provide technical leadership and expertise across AWS and GCP.
• Define and evolve cloud architecture in line with business requirements and future growth.
• Ensure cloud infrastructure is secure, resilient, scalable and cost-effective.
• Identify opportunities to optimise cloud usage, improve efficiency and manage costs effectively.

Drive event-driven architecture

• Provide leadership and oversight of event-driven architecture using Kafka.
• Ensure reliable, scalable data streaming and processing capabilities.

Partner across Technology

• Work closely with Product and Engineering teams to understand their needs and provide platform capabilities that improve developer productivity.
• Collaborate with architecture, security, operations and other technology functions to ensure effective integration and alignment.
• Act as a senior technology leader, communicating platform strategy, progress, risks and opportunities clearly to senior stakeholders.

Champion continuous improvement

• Continuously assess emerging technologies and industry trends to identify opportunities to improve our platform.
• Drive improvements in platform reliability, performance, scalability and developer experience.
• Establish effective monitoring, logging and alerting capabilities.
• Use data and engineering metrics to identify opportunities for improvement and demonstrate the impact of Platform Engineering.

What we are looking for:

• Significant experience leading Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE or Cloud Engineering teams.
• Experience managing and developing sizeable engineering teams, including internal and external resources.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and/or GCP and cloud-native architecture.
• Extensive experience with Kubernetes and containerised environments.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience, particularly Terraform and Ansible.
• Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures using Kafka.
• A strong understanding of CI/CD, automation and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling and self-service capabilities.
• A strong understanding of reliability, observability, security and scalability.
• Experience using engineering metrics and data to drive continuous improvement.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence engineers, technology leaders and senior stakeholders.

Why work for us?

We're in your corner and our vision is to be the UK's most loved and desired broadband provider, that shows the way broadband is done!

Awarded Broadband Provider of the Year 2023 Uswitch Telecoms Awards, as voted for by 20,000 customers, plus Fair Terms Gold Award 2023. We're also very proud to have been awarded Great Place to Work Certification (2022-23) and UK's Best Workplaces for Wellbeing (2022)

In our Belgrade office, we work with our UK colleagues in a shared mission: to gigabit Britain. Our office started up in 2013 with what was then 20 developers, now we're more than 700 people. Do you want to be a part of our next adventure?

Some of our key Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Global Remote working for up to 2 week per year for those who are able to work remotely
• 25 days' paid holiday increasing each year, to a max of 35
• Extra days off for your birthday, move house and volunteer
• Access to a wellbeing platform, Rezilient
• Partnership with SOS Children's Village
• Private medical insurance (Permanent employees)
• Fit Pass discount
• Technology discount
• Team sports activities
• Massages in the office
• Sweet Tuesdays

What happens next?

You apply (please send us your CV in English)
We carefully review your application
We'll get back to you — even if it's a no (for now)