Head of Platform Engineering - Remote & Automation-Driven

Primis; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus 10%

Fully remote

Home office budget

Employer pension 5%

45 days holiday + bank holidays

Certifications budget £5,000

Job summary

Primis in the United Kingdom seeks an experienced Director of Platform Engineering to lead the internal platform team. You’ll set technical direction, own architecture decisions and stay hands‑on to establish high standards across IaC, observability, and cloud‑native services.

You’ll hire and mentor engineers, align priorities with cross‑functional leaders, and drive realistic delivery plans. The role emphasizes automation, AI-assisted engineering and production reliability, while managing

Qualifications

• Solid background in Network Engineering.
• Proven experience leading a multi‑discipline team (IE systems, network, reliability).
• Can write and review IaC (Terraform or Ansible).
• Strong understanding of core platform fundamentals: IaC, secrets management, service discovery, identity and access, observability and public cloud.
• Experience owning production services in regulated environments (PCI would be beneficial).
• Assisted AI Engineering experience with Claude or similar for reviewing and refactoring code, IaC and automation.
• MCP understanding around how agents reach tools and data through MCP.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and turn recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities.
• Own architecture and key design decisions across cost, performance and reliability.
• Stay hands‑on, setting standards and reviewing code, infrastructure and designs.
• Prioritise the roadmap and deliver well‑documented, observable self‑service capabilities.
• Hire, develop and retain engineers through clear expectations and regular feedback.
• Agree priorities with cross‑functional leaders and create realistic delivery plans.
• Run delivery openly, tracking outcomes, service levels and performance.
• Drive automation and responsible AI‑assisted engineering across the team.
• Own production reliability, on‑call, incident response and continuous improvement.
• Manage stakeholders, suppliers, budgets and risks, escalating issues early.

Skills

Network engineering

Team leadership

IaC

Terraform/Ansible

Public cloud

Observability

PCI/regulatory experience

AI-assisted engineering

MCP

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Prometheus

Job description

Primis in the United Kingdom seeks an experienced Director of Platform Engineering to lead the internal platform team. You’ll set technical direction, own architecture decisions and stay hands‑on to establish high standards across IaC, observability, and cloud‑native services.

You’ll hire and mentor engineers, align priorities with cross‑functional leaders, and drive realistic delivery plans. The role emphasizes automation, AI-assisted engineering and production reliability, while managing