Director of Platform Engineering - SaaS & Observability

ITRS; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance and Dental Coverage

Pension

Flexible Hybrid Working

Enhanced Parental Leave

Travel Insurance

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Referral Bonus

Training Reimbursement

Job summary

ITRS is seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead a hands-on, high-availability SaaS platform that serves global financial institutions. You will supervise the Analytics SaaS stack, guide architecture decisions, and drive automation across cloud-native services and Kubernetes environments.

You will shape the engineering culture, coach engineers, and ensure security, compliance, and operational excellence while collaborating with product, security and customer-facing teams.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading SaaS hosting/Platform Engineering teams in high-availability or regulated environments.
• Track record of building and improving operational teams, driving reliability and automation.
• Deep Kubernetes operations knowledge including deployments, networking, storage and autoscaling.
• Strong cloud operations across AWS/Azure/GCP with secure, cost-aware design.
• In-depth experience with IaC, CI/CD, and GitOps to produce auditable production changes.
• Experience applying AI/automation to operational workflows with appropriate oversight.
• Understanding of security, compliance and incident management for SaaS.
• Experience collaborating with Forward Deployed Engineering and customer-facing teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day management, reliability and continuous improvement of the Analytics SaaS platform.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for a SaaS engineering team, setting standards and coaching.
• Work directly with engineers on production issues, incident response and deployment automation.
• Drive automation to reduce manual toil and enable self-healing capabilities.
• Explore Agentic AI to improve operational decision support and runbook execution.
• Own SaaS operational standards including runbooks, monitoring, change control and communications.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Security and Customer teams for operability and security.
• Develop Forward Deployed Engineering function to align with delivery and support standards.
• Ensure practices meet regulated-industry expectations for access control and resilience.

Skills

Kubernetes operations

Cloud operations (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD / GitOps

Automation / SRE mindset

Observability / monitoring

Security & compliance

Forward Deployed Engineering

Leadership / people management

Operational resilience

Tools

Argo CD

Flux

Amazon EKS

Azure AKS

Google GKE

Job description

ITRS is seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead a hands-on, high-availability SaaS platform that serves global financial institutions. You will supervise the Analytics SaaS stack, guide architecture decisions, and drive automation across cloud-native services and Kubernetes environments.

You will shape the engineering culture, coach engineers, and ensure security, compliance, and operational excellence while collaborating with product, security and customer-facing teams.