Director of Platform Operations

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of Arbor’s operational backbone across its suite of applications.

• Integrate Site Reliability Engineering, Security Engineering, and Developer Experience under a unified leadership structure.

• Ensure commitment to availability and accountability for the 99.9% availability SLA.

• Define, publish, and manage SLO and error-budget frameworks.

• Lead initiatives in observability, capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and reduction of toil.

• Communicate availability, latency, and error-budget consumption metrics to product teams, R&D leadership, executives, and key stakeholders.

• Drive improvements in systemic reliability and address recurring issues, isolated points of failure, and architectural vulnerabilities.

• Establish and manage vulnerability management for application code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure.

• Develop vulnerability reporting and dashboards while driving remediation efforts against SLAs.

• Integrate security measures into engineering workflows via automated scanning, secure-by-default platform patterns, dependency hygiene, and team enablement.

• Collaborate with security leadership and the CISO on security posture, roadmap, compliance responsibilities, and audit documentation.

• Guide the transition to a “build it, run it” model, granting product engineering teams ownership of production, including on-call duties, alerting, and operational health.

• Oversee the delivery of the internal developer platform, golden paths, self-service tools, CI/CD processes, and environment provisioning.

• Manage the platform as a product, engaging with internal customers, establishing service levels, tracking adoption metrics, gathering feedback, and maintaining an impact-focused roadmap.

• Oversee engineering productivity metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and time to restore.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in senior leadership roles within SRE, platform, or infrastructure functions at scale.

• Proven track record of maintaining availability against a defined SLA in a customer-facing SaaS setting.

• Extensive hands-on knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, observability, capacity planning, and problem management.

• Experience managing major incident processes, including incident command frameworks, on-call design, and blameless post-incident reviews.

• Demonstrated success in materially improving MTTR.

• Experience in managing or closely collaborating on security posture, vulnerability management at scale, remediation SLAs, and executive or board-level reporting.

• Proven ability to lead a shift towards distributed production ownership (“build it, run it”).

• Familiarity with internal developer platforms or platform-as-a-product models.

• Experience leveraging engineering productivity metrics to inform investment decisions.

• Judgement in applying AI within operational workflows.

• Strong track record in building and developing engineering leaders, including effective performance management.

• Capacity to achieve results through influence across teams outside of direct reporting lines.

• Strong technical credibility with AWS and Terraform.

• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, including the ability to present technical and risk concepts to non-technical audiences during live incidents.

• Desirable: experience in enterprise SaaS at scale, preferably in EdTech or other data-sensitive or regulated sectors.

• Desirable: knowledge of ISO 27001, SOC 2, Cyber Essentials Plus, and UK GDPR compliance obligations.

• Desirable: hands-on experience with AIOps or AI-assisted incident management tools.

• Desirable: experience managing multi-product, multi-market environments based on shared platform foundations.

• Desirable: familiarity with PHP-based estates, Docker, containerization, Kanban, and agile methodologies.

• Desirable: accountability for FinOps and cloud cost efficiency.

• Must be eligible to work without visa sponsorship, as sponsorship is not available.

🏝️ Benefits

• A dedicated wellbeing team and initiatives including mindfulness, lunch and learns, manager training, and mental health first aid training.

• 32 days of holiday plus Bank Holidays (25 days annual leave plus 7 company-wide days).

• Life Assurance valued at 3x annual salary.

• Comprehensive wellness benefits through AIG Smart Health, offering 24/7 virtual GP access, mental health support, counselling, and personalized health checks.

• Private Dental Insurance provided by Bupa.

• Salary sacrifice pension scheme offered by Scottish Widows.

• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay).

• Enhanced paternity leave (6 weeks full pay).

• 5 complimentary return-to-work maternity coaching sessions.

• Access to Calm and Bippit for financial wellbeing coaching.

• Flexible working arrangements.

• Social committees and events at team, office, and company-wide levels.

• A dedicated professional development training budget, including CPD courses, upskilling resources, and professional memberships.

• One paid volunteer day each year.

• Dog-friendly office environment.

• Referral voucher worth up to £200.