Platform Engineering Director - SaaS & Observability

Itrs Insights; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Pension

Flexible Hybrid Working

Travel Insurance

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Training Reimbursement

Referral Bonus

Buy and Sell Holiday

Enhanced Parental Leave

Job summary

ITRS is seeking an experienced Director of Platform Engineering to lead our Analytics SaaS platform, focusing on Kubernetes-based services, cloud-native operations, and reliable service outcomes. You will guide hands-on SaaS engineering, set standards, coach engineers, and drive automation and observability.

In this role you will own SaaS operational standards, collaborate with Engineering, Product, Security and Customer-facing teams, and manage Forward Deployed Engineers to ensure scalable,

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading SaaS hosting teams in a hands-on tech leadership role.
• Track record building and improving operational teams with accountability for reliability.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes operations, deployments, upgrades and troubleshooting.
• Strong cloud operations across AWS, Azure or GCP with secure, resilient infra.
• Hands-on experience with IaC, CI/CD & GitOps for controlled production changes.
• Experience reducing operational toil via automation and self-service.
• Understanding of Agentic AI safely applied to operations with human oversight.
• Technical depth to challenge designs and contribute hands-on when needed.

Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day management, reliability and continuous improvement of the Analytics SaaS platform.
• Provide technical leadership to a hands-on SaaS engineering team with clear standards.
• Remain hands-on with production issues, Kubernetes troubleshooting, incident response and deployment automation.
• Drive automation and self-healing to reduce manual intervention and toil.
• Explore Agentic AI and intelligent automation to improve operational workflows.
• Own SaaS operational standards including runbooks, monitoring, change control and post-incident reviews.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Security and Customer-facing teams to ensure operability, security and supportability.

Skills

Kubernetes operations

Cloud platforms

Automation tooling

SaaS leadership

GitOps

AI / Agentic AI

Incident management

Communication

Stakeholder alignment

Tools

Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE)

GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux)

Cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Job description

ITRS is seeking an experienced Director of Platform Engineering to lead our Analytics SaaS platform, focusing on Kubernetes-based services, cloud-native operations, and reliable service outcomes. You will guide hands-on SaaS engineering, set standards, coach engineers, and drive automation and observability.

In this role you will own SaaS operational standards, collaborate with Engineering, Product, Security and Customer-facing teams, and manage Forward Deployed Engineers to ensure scalable,