Director of Platform Engineering

Jobtailor

Greater London

Hybrid

GBP 110,000 - 140,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Job summary

ITRS is seeking a Senior SaaS Operations Leader to guide the day-to-day reliability and continuous improvement of its Analytics platform. You will direct a hands-on engineering team, set standards for automation, and drive incident response, capacity planning, and observability.

Collaboration with security, product and customer-facing teams is essential to maintain resilience. The role focuses on reducing toil, advancing runbooks, and applying Agentic AI to operational workflows, while ensuring

Qualifications

Proven experience leading SaaS hosting teams in hands-on technical leadership roles.
Track record of building, leading and improving operational teams.
Deep practical knowledge of Kubernetes operations (deployments, upgrades, networking, storage, ingress, secrets, autoscaling, troubleshooting).
Strong cloud operations experience across AWS, Azure or GCP.
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, GitOps or similar automation.
Experience reducing operational toil through automation, self-service, runbooks and observability.
Understanding of Agentic AI or intelligent automation in operations.
Technical depth to troubleshoot production issues and contribute directly.
Understanding of security/compliance expectations for SaaS operations.
Experience collaborating with Forward Deployed Engineering or customer-embedded teams.

Responsibilities

Lead day-to-day management, reliability and continuous improvement of the Analytics SaaS platform.
Provide technical leadership for a hands-on SaaS engineering team.
Set standards, coach engineers and foster ownership, automation and reliability.
Resolve production issues, Kubernetes troubleshooting, incident response and deployment automation.
Drive automation to reduce toil and manual hand-offs.
Explore Agentic AI for operational decision support and runbook execution.
Own SaaS operational standards including runbooks, monitoring, and change control.
Collaborate across Engineering, Product, Security and Customer-facing teams on operability and security.
Manage and develop the Forward Deployed Engineering function.
Ensure practices meet regulated-industry expectations for access control and continuity.
Report to the Global Head of Platform Engineering.

Skills

SaaS Operations Leadership

Kubernetes Operations

Cloud Operations

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD

GitOps

Automation

Observability

Incident Management

Change Management

Production Troubleshooting

Security & Compliance understanding

Forward Deployed Engineer experience

ISO 27001 / SOC 2 awareness

Agentic AI / Intelligent Automation

Education

ISO 27001

SOC 2

Tools

Amazon EKS

Azure AKS

Google GKE

Argo CD

Flux

Job description

Lead the day-to-day management, reliability and continuous improvement of ITRS’ Analytics SaaS platform
Provide technical leadership for a hands-on SaaS engineering team
Set standards, coach engineers and build a culture focused on ownership, automation and reliability
Work directly with engineers on production issues, Kubernetes troubleshooting, incident response, deployment automation, observability, capacity management and service resilience
Drive automation to reduce manual intervention, operational toil and human hand-offs
Explore and adopt Agentic AI and intelligent automation for operational decision support, incident triage, runbook execution, knowledge retrieval, change preparation and service management
Own SaaS operational standards, including runbooks, monitoring, alerting, incident management, post-incident reviews, backup and recovery, change control and customer-impact communications
Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Security and Customer-facing teams on operability, scalability, security and supportability
Manage and develop the Forward Deployed Engineering function
Ensure operational practices meet regulated-industry expectations for access control, change management, incident response, vulnerability management and service continuity
Report to the Global Head of Platform Engineering

Requirements

Proven experience leading SaaS Hosting teams in a hands-on technical leadership role, ideally within a high-availability, enterprise or regulated environment
Track record of building, leading and improving operational teams
Deep practical knowledge of Kubernetes operations, including deployments, upgrades, networking, storage, ingress, secrets, autoscaling, workload troubleshooting and cluster reliability
Strong cloud operations experience across AWS, Azure or GCP
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, GitOps or similar automation approaches
Experience reducing operational toil through automation, workflow redesign, self-service capabilities, standardised runbooks and improved observability
Understanding of Agentic AI or intelligent automation applied safely to operational workflows
Technical depth to troubleshoot complex production issues and contribute directly
Understanding of security and compliance expectations for SaaS operations
Experience leading or working closely with Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering or similar customer-embedded technical teams
Strong communication skills
Preferred: Forward Deployed Engineer experience
Preferred: Managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS or Google GKE
Preferred: GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux
Preferred: ISO 27001, SOC 2 or similar assurance frameworks
Preferred: AI, Agentic AI, AIOps or intelligent automation experience
Preferred: Observability and reliability practices, including SRE principles, service-level objectives, alert tuning, capacity planning and production readiness reviews
Preferred: SaaS experience for financial services, enterprise technology or regulated customers
Preferred: Container security, policy-as-code, image scanning, secrets management, role-based access control and Kubernetes security hardening
Preferred: DevOps, SRE, Cloud Operations or Platform Engineering background

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in leading SaaS operations with a focus on automation, reliability, and compliance in regulated environments. Proficient in Kubernetes management, cloud operations, and technical leadership within engineering teams.

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