Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering

Technical & Architectural

Deep experience in cloud-native platform engineering on AWS, including IaC (Terraform or Pulumi), containerisation (Kubernetes/ECS), event streaming (Kafka), and API gateway patterns.

Proven track record designing and operating shared platform services - integration layers, identity, multi-tenancy, and developer-facing APIs - in a complex, multi-product enterprise SaaS environment.

Hands-on background in data platform engineering: data lake architecture, ELT pipelines, and familiarity with Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS data services (Athena, Glue, EMR).

Experience building AI/ML infrastructure: feature stores, model serving, MLOps pipelines, and LLM-enabling platform capabilities such as MCP server infrastructure or LLM gateway services.

Strong understanding of platform observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, SLO/error budget frameworks, and production reliability engineering.

Security-first mindset with hands-on experience in enterprise security practices, compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), and zero-trust architecture patterns.

Leadership & Delivery

Extensive engineering leadership experience, with a proven record of building, scaling, and developing high-performing distributed engineering teams of 60+ people.

Experience operating within an acquisitive software business, with the ability to lead M&A technical integration and platform standardisation across acquired codebases and teams.

Familiarity with modern delivery frameworks (SAFe, Shape Up, or equivalent) and the ability to adapt methodology to the needs of a platform organisation serving multiple internal customers.

Strong FinOps capability, including cloud cost governance, unit economics thinking, and the ability to frame infrastructure investment in commercial terms.

Agentic Engineering & AI Tooling

Practical experience adopting and scaling AI-native development tooling (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) across engineering organisations.

Understanding of agentic software delivery patterns: autonomous agents, human-in-the-loop workflows, agentic code review, test generation, and AI-assisted architecture.

Ability to define governance frameworks that enable AI-augmented development at pace while managing code quality, IP protection, and data security risks.

Passion for driving engineering culture change, with the ability to take a sceptical or early-majority engineering team on a credible AI adoption journey.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex platform and data engineering decisions into clear narratives for executive, commercial, and board audiences.

Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience partnering with product, commercial, and finance leadership in a PE-backed, high-growth software environment.