Platform Lead

Blue Light Card; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

25 days annual leave plus public holidays

Company bonus scheme

Learning and development opportunities

Private medical insurance

Job summary

Blue Light Card is looking for a Platform Lead to join their Engineering team in Greater London. This pivotal role involves leading the Platform Engineering team, defining the platform roadmap, and ensuring teams have the necessary tooling and infrastructure. The ideal candidate has proven leadership in platform or infrastructure functions, expertise in AWS and Terraform, and a focus on building high-performing teams. The position offers hybrid working, generous leave, and various employee benefits.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading a Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE function.
• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise across compute, networking, storage, serverless, and security.
• Strong Terraform experience, building infrastructure-as-code that teams adopt.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team.
• Own the platform roadmap for product teams.
• Set clear production readiness standards including reliability and security.

Skills

AWS expertise

Terraform experience

CI/CD pipelines

Incident management

Mentoring engineers

Job description

Blue Light Card. Individually great, together unstoppable

The Role and the Team

We’re looking for a Platform Lead to join our Engineering team at Blue Light Card at a pivotal moment. This is a foundational role, with the platform function just getting started and a real opportunity to shape its direction, culture, and impact from the ground up. As Platform Lead, you’ll own platform engineering end to end, setting the strategy, building the team, and ensuring product squads have the tooling, infrastructure, and paved roads they need to deliver with confidence. You’ll define what “production ready” means across the organization and work closely with Staff Engineers and Engineering Managers to make the right technical choices the easiest ones to make. This is a hands‑on leadership role that balances deep technical involvement with organizational impact. You’ll stay close to the technology and the challenges teams face, while owning the platform roadmap, influencing technical direction, and building a platform team that product squads trust and rely on.

What you’ll do

• Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team, creating an environment where engineers and squads can thrive
• Own the platform roadmap, ensuring it delivers clear value to product teams and supports business growth
• Act as the trusted technical authority for platform and infrastructure decisions across engineering
• Set clear, practical production readiness standards covering reliability, observability, security, scalability, and cost
• Build and evolve paved‑road platform solutions, reference architectures, and reusable tooling
• Embed strong operational practices, including SLOs, alerting, and effective incident management
• Use operational data and insights to continuously improve platform reliability, performance, and efficiency
• Enable product teams to be increasingly self‑sufficient through great documentation, collaboration, and thoughtful use of automation and AI

What you’ll bring

• Proven experience leading a Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE function in a product led engineering organization
• Deep, hands‑on AWS expertise across compute, networking, storage, serverless, and security
• Strong Terraform experience, building reusable infrastructure‑as‑code that teams actively adopt
• Experience defining and operating SLOs, observability standards, and incident management at scaleAbility to set technical direction and communicate it clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders
• A strong people focus, with a track record of mentoring engineers and building high performing teams
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and logging platforms, and modern platform engineering practices
• A commercial mindset, connecting platform investment to delivery speed, cost efficiency, and positive business outcomes

What We Offer

• Hybrid working
• 25 days plus public holidays, buy and sell and an additional day off for your birthday
• A company bonus scheme
• Great social events e.g., Christmas party, family fun day, summer party, sports matches
• Learning and development opportunities
• Group auto‑enrolment pension plan
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, sick pay
• Company funded private medical insurance
• Healthcare cashback plan
• Employee assistance programme (including mental health support)
• Modern office space with onsite gym including access to free HIIT & stretch classes, games area, chill-out areas, book club, and more, when you visit our HQ in Cossington