Director, Platform Engineering & ML Infra

Relation; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Relation, a TechBio company in London, seeks an Associate Director, Platform Engineering to lead the hybrid compute infrastructure and scientific compute environments powering our ML and drug discovery work.

You will set the technical direction across Kubernetes-based clusters, on‑premises and cloud, build and develop the Platform Engineering team, and collaborate with Engineering, Data Science and ML to evolve our platform strategy.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in platform, infrastructure or DevOps engineering.
• Experience leading engineers with responsibility for workstreams from strategy to delivery.
• Hands-on operational experience, on-call rotations and incident responses.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes across hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.
• Experience building, running or evolving MLOps infrastructure including Kubeflow and GPU compute.
• Familiarity with data pipelines and observability requirements in scientific environments.
• Strong security fundamentals and ability to implement appropriate controls.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to co-own strategy with senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve Relation’s platform strategy with VP and peers across Engineering/Data Science/ML.
• Own architectural strategy for Kubernetes-based clusters and hybrid infra, setting standards and guardrails.
• Lead and develop Platform Engineering team, hiring and retaining engineers and setting expectations.
• Own the scientific compute platform to meet evolving ML and data science needs.
• Drive maturity of CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling, treating the platform as a product.
• Establish observability, disaster recovery and failover strategies across on‑prem and cloud.
• Own platform security controls including IAM, secrets management and network policy.

Skills

Platform engineering

Team leadership

Kubernetes

MLOps

CI/CD pipelines

Security fundamentals

Observability

Hybrid infrastructure

Stakeholder management

Technical communication

Tools

Kubeflow

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Relation, a TechBio company in London, seeks an Associate Director, Platform Engineering to lead the hybrid compute infrastructure and scientific compute environments powering our ML and drug discovery work.

You will set the technical direction across Kubernetes-based clusters, on‑premises and cloud, build and develop the Platform Engineering team, and collaborate with Engineering, Data Science and ML to evolve our platform strategy.