Head of Platform

Myunidays Limited; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working model

Competitive salary and benefits

Company pension

Private health insurance

Dental Insurance

Income protection

Life assurance

Employee Assistance Program

Parental leave pay

Team building activities

Home office stipend

Job summary

UNiDAYS is seeking a hands-on Head of Platform to lead how engineers build, ship and run software and data. You will treat the platform as a product whose customers are engineers, building self-service tools, pipelines and guardrails for fast, safe delivery.

You will set platform strategy, grow the team, and still write code, review designs and prototype tooling. A strong data operations focus will drive reliable, observable pipelines across the stack.

Qualifications

• Led and managed multiple engineering teams with platform, infrastructure, DevOps or data engineering scope.
• Built internal developer platforms or self-service tooling adopted by engineers.
• Hands-on with infrastructure-as-code, containers, CI/CD and cloud-native environments (AWS).
• Experience building and running production data pipelines and related tooling (Airflow, dbt, cloud data warehouse).
• Strong coding skills in Python, Go or TypeScript and willingness to stay hands-on.
• Able to set technical direction and translate business goals into a platform roadmap.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and stakeholder management to drive adoption.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the platform strategy and roadmap, treating platform as an internal product for engineers.
• Build self-service goldens paths, templates, CI/CD pipelines, and IaC modules for engineers to use without assistance.
• Grow data ops capability with reliable, observable pipelines and self-service data access.
• Embed data quality, lineage and monitoring into pipelines from the start.
• Own observability, reliability and incident practices across the platform with SLOs and runbooks.
• Improve developer experience by measuring lead time, deployment frequency and platform adoption.
• Ensure security, compliance and cloud cost awareness are built into the platform by default.
• Stay technically engaged: contribute code, participate in design reviews, prototype new tooling.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Platform roadmap

Self-service tooling

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

AWS

Airflow

dbt

Python/Go/TypeScript

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS

Airflow

dbt

Redshift

Job description

Job requirements

• Led and managed multiple engineering teams, ideally including platform, infrastructure, DevOps or data engineering teams.
• A proven track record of building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling that engineers actually adopted.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native environments (AWS).
• Experience building and running production data pipelines and the tooling around them (e.g. Airflow, dbt, a cloud data warehouse).
• Strong coding skills (e.g. Python, Go or TypeScript) and a desire to stay hands-on.
• Shown the ability to set technical direction and turn business goals into a platform roadmap.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and stakeholder management skills, and able to win adoption through influence rather than mandate.

We’re looking for a Head of Platform to lead how UNiDAYS engineers build, ship and run software and data. You’ll treat the platform as a product whose customers are our engineers. That means building self-service tools, pipelines and guardrails so teams can move quickly and safely without having to raise a ticket.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll set the platform strategy and grow the team, but you’ll also write code, review designs and prototype tooling. A key part of the role is growing our data operations capability, so that data pipelines are as reliable, observable and self-serve as the rest of the platform.

Bonus Points

• Experience with multi-cloud environments (AWS and GCP).
• Experience with DataOps practices such as data contracts, data quality frameworks and lineage.
• Experience with observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) at scale
• Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.
• Experience using AI/LLM tooling to speed up engineering workflows.

This role sits at Head of Engineering level on the UNiDAYS Software Engineering Career Framework (people manager track).

Job responsibilities

• Define and own the platform strategy and roadmap, treating the platform as an internal product with engineers as its customers.
• Build self-service "golden paths" (service templates, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning and infrastructure-as-code modules) that engineers can pick up and use without help.
• Grow our data ops capability: reliable, observable and well-tested data pipelines across orchestration, transformation and the warehouse (e.g. Airflow, dbt, Redshift), with self-service ways for engineers to publish and use data.
• Build data quality, lineage and monitoring into the pipelines rather than bolting them on afterwards.
• Own observability, reliability and incident practice across the platform, including SLOs, alerting, runbooks and blameless post-incident learning.
• Improve developer experience and measure it. Track outcomes such as lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and platform adoption, and act on what you find.
• Embed security, compliance and cloud cost awareness into the platform by default, so the right thing is also the easy thing.
• Stay technically engaged: contribute code, take part in design and code reviews, and prototype new tooling, while keeping a focus on leadership and delegation.
• Build, structure and mentor the platform and data ops teams, and help team members grow their technical and leadership capabilities.
• Champion clear communication between platform, product engineering, data and security, and make sure the platform is shaped by what teams actually need.
• Stay up to date on platform engineering, DevOps and DataOps practices, including AI-assisted tooling, and keep looking for ways to raise the productivity of the whole engineering function.

We Offer:

• The chance to shape how every engineer at UNiDAYS builds, ships and runs software and data.
• A collaborative and supportive work environment that fosters innovation.
• A competitive salary and benefits package.
• A chance to make a significant contribution to a growing team and to build a platform function with real ownership.

This is your opportunity to Join the world’s largest student verification network and help shape the future of how brands connect with the next generation. We engage a community of 23M+ verified students and graduates across 115 markets, making us a truly global platform. Our brand is a powerhouse in the UK, and we’re rapidly accelerating our presence worldwide—especially in the US, Germany, India, France, Canada, and Australia.

We partner with 850+ of the world’s biggest brands, bringing their products and services to the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s professionals—driving engagement, building affinity, and delivering real results.

We offer a fast-paced, fun, and social working environment where you can truly make an impact. We believe work should enhance and complement your life, which is why we provide a hybrid working model. You will work together in person a minimum of 2 days per week and work from home for up to 3 days a week.

We work hard at UNiDAYS, and we believe in fair compensation for that hard work. That’s why we’re proud to offer all employees full access to our comprehensive benefits package.

25 days holiday per year increasing with length of service, plus bank holidays

4pm finishes every Friday

Company pension scheme

Private health insurance (BUPA)

Dental Insurance (BUPA)

Income protection policy

Life assurance policy

Employee Assistance Program

Enhanced parental leave pay

Regular team building activities

£150 pounds towards your home office set up

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.