Head of Platform Engineering Location: Manchester (Hybrid) Type: Permanent Salary: 115-135k DOE
The Role
We're looking for a visionary cloud and platform engineering leader to take ownership of the entire digital infrastructure estate for a Manchester-based SaaS business that sits at the heart of the UK financial services market. This isn't a maintenance role, you'll be defining the strategic direction for both legacy modernisation and greenfield cloud-native development, while building a platform culture that empowers engineers to deliver world-class financial technology at pace.
What You'll Be Doing
• Owning and executing the long-term platform strategy, ensuring infrastructure investments align with commercial growth objectives
• Defining governance frameworks and standardised deployment patterns, golden paths that bring consistency across all engineering squads
• Architecting the migration of mission-critical legacy systems to cloud-native environments while maintaining the highest standards of uptime and reliability
• Taking full accountability for a multi-million-pound platform budget, driving sophisticated FinOps and cloud unit economics
• Overseeing complex multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies across AWS and Azure
• Recruiting, mentoring, and developing a high-performing platform engineering function
• Acting as the primary voice for platform engineering at senior leadership level, balancing technical ambition with regulatory compliance
• Bridging the gap between executive business goals and technical execution, equally comfortable presenting roadmaps to the board and diving into technical blockers with your engineers
• Championing a product-centric platform culture built on psychological safety, high performance, and continuous learning
What We're Looking For
• Significant experience leading Platform or DevOps engineering functions at senior level, ideally within regulated financial services or high-growth fintech
• Deep, hands-on expertise in AWS, the core cloud platform
• Exposure to GCP is a further advantage as the business evaluates where it fits within the wider cloud landscape
• Mastery of infrastructure-as-code, particularly Terraform, and CI/CD tooling including Buildkite and GitHub Actions
• Strong container orchestration experience, particularly Kubernetes
• A proven track record of leading large-scale digital transformations monolithic to microservices, legacy to cloud-native
• Demonstrated ability to manage multi-million-pound cloud budgets and negotiate with major vendors
• Experience operating within a regulated environment with a clear understanding of compliance, security, and governance at platform level
• A genuine belief in Platform-as-a-Product and the ability to build engineering cultures that reflect that
Why Join?
You'll be joining a SaaS business whose platform underpins billions of pounds of financial transactions and hundreds of thousands of customer accounts across the UK market. The scale is real, the technical challenges are complex, and the opportunity to shape both the platform and the team around it is genuine. If you want a role where your decisions carry weight and your work leaves a lasting technical legacy, this is it.