Platform Technical Lead (OpenShift)

Tesco; Welwyn Garden City; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Tesco is seeking a Platform Technical Lead to own the platform product, reporting to the Head Of System Engineering. You will define the technical roadmap, drive architecture across OpenShift and GitOps, and ensure production-grade delivery. You will coach engineers and partner with product teams to meet business outcomes.

The role requires deep OpenShift experience, strong leadership, and a product‑driven mindset. Hybrid work with 60% in office, flexible to local sites across the UK.

Qualifications

• Proven technical leadership of a platform or product engineering team.
• Acts as design authority: writes ADRs, leads design reviews and maintains standards.
• Treats the platform as a product: designs and versions interfaces, measures consumption.
• Analytical approach to complex troubleshooting and incident resolution.
• Communicates design and risk to diverse stakeholders with evidence.
• Translates Tesco strategy into a credible technical roadmap with sequencing and risk.
• Coaches engineers and builds succession for critical capabilities.
• Works product-first within agile delivery; focuses on outcomes over outputs.
• Eliminates toil and automation as a default in production paths.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform's design and technical roadmap; author ADRs and run design reviews.
• Maintain target architecture across full stack and enforce paved-road patterns.
• Define API and interface contracts, versioning, and deprecation discipline.
• Measure experience and iteratively improve integration lead time and reliability.
• Ensure platform services are production-grade: tested, documented, observable.
• Develop engineers, assess skills against production evidence, and coach seniors.
• Represent the platform in cross-team forums and translate strategy into designs.
• Lead DevOps practices and drive automation across the platform team.

Skills

Platform leadership

Design authority

Platform as a product

Troubleshooting & debugging

Technical risk communication

Roadmapping & delivery

Mentoring engineers

Agile delivery

Toil elimination

Tools

OpenShift

OpenShift Virtualization / KubeVirt

Argo CD

ACM

Gatekeeper/OPA

Kubernetes internals

HyperShift / HCP

GitOps tooling

Prometheus/Alertmanager

Grafana

CRDs and operators

Go/Python/Bash

Job description

The Platform Technical Lead is the technical owner of the platform product. Reporting directly into the Head Of System Engineering (HoSE) and whilst specific responsibilities will be dependent upon the changing needs of the Tesco business, the following provides an overview of the role’s key responsibilities and measures
They own how the platform is designed, built, operated and evolved, and are accountable for its technical integrity in production. They partner with the Platform Product Lead, who owns product direction and stakeholder outcomes; the Platform Technical Lead owns the engineering that delivers them. Technical authority and design

• Act as design authority for the platform: own the technical roadmap, author and ratify Architecture Decision Records, run design review, and hold the line on standards. Decisions are documented, evidenced and reversible-by-design where possible.
• Own the target architecture for the platform across its full stack: OpenShift (HCP / Virtualization), GitOps delivery (Argo CD), multi-cluster management and policy (ACM, Gatekeeper/OPA), observability, networking and storage integration, and infrastructure-as-code. Set and enforce the paved-road patterns the team builds to.
• Evaluate new technologies against product outcomes, not novelty: run structured spikes with defined success criteria, and make adopt/hold/reject calls with written rationale.

Platform as a Product.Treat the consuming product teams as customers. Own the platform's service interface to those products: API and interface contracts, versioning and deprecation discipline, capacity and performance guarantees, and the documentation that lets product teams consume the platform without needing to understand its internals. Measure the experience (integration lead time, breaking-change incidents, ticket deflection) and improve it deliberately.

• Understand how infrastructure product teams expose the platform to application engineering teams, and factor that end-to-end developer experience into platform design decisions - the platform is only as good as what the products can build on it.
• Own the technical content of the platform product roadmap jointly with the Platform Lead: they prioritise the what, the Platform Technical Lead defines the how, effort, sequencing and technical risk.
• Eliminate toil systematically: everything operated more than twice is a candidate for automation; anything manual in the production path is a defect on the backlog.
• Develop and maintain DevOps practices within the Platform Team. The team owns and supports what they build.

Production ownership

• Accountable for the platform's operational integrity: SLOs, error budgets, capacity and performance. Lead technical response on novel or high-severity incidents, own the post-incident review, and convert findings into engineering change, not just runbook entries.
• Ensure everything the team ships is production-grade: designed, documented, tested, observable and handoff-ready, with no single person as the sole holder of any critical capability.

People and capability

• Own the technical development of engineers to validate skill assessments against production evidence, set stretch assignments against capability gaps, and coach seniors towards design ownership.
• Represent the platform with authority in cross-team and architecture forums; translate architectural strategy into designs that can actually deliver, and push back with evidence where strategy and practicality conflict.

Skills / Experience Required

• Proven technical leadership of a platform or product engineering team: sets direction, owns design decisions, and is accountable for what ships to production.
• Acts as design authority: authors and maintains high-quality design records (ADRs or equivalent), runs design review, and holds standards without becoming a bottleneck.
• Treats the platform as a product: understands consuming teams as customers, designs and versions interfaces deliberately, and measures the consumption experience rather than assuming it.
• Structured, analytical approach to complex troubleshooting: forms hypotheses, isolates variables, resolves incidents not previously seen, and converts findings into engineering change.
• Communicates technical design and risk with authority to mixed audiences, from engineers to senior non-technical stakeholders, and can defend or revise a position based on evidence.
• Translates Tesco Technology and business strategy into a credible technical roadmap: sequencing, effort and risk, not just ambition.
• Coaches and develops engineers with evidence: validates skill assessments against production work, sets stretch assignments against capability gaps, and builds succession so no critical capability rests on one person.
• Works product-first within agile delivery: outcomes over outputs, incremental delivery, honest reporting of technical risk.
• Systematically eliminates toil: treats anything manual in the production path as a defect and automates as a default behaviour, personally and across the team.

Technology Skills:

• (Must Have) Practical experience of designing, building and operating Red Hat OpenShift at scale in production, running both containers and virtual machines (OpenShift Virtualization / KubeVirt) across multiple regions or sites, including lifecycle and upgrade management.
• Expert-level Kubernetes internals: scheduling, resource management, RBAC and admission control, CNI networking behaviour, CSI storage, and troubleshooting at the control-plane layer (etcd, API server, ingress).
• Hosted control plane architectures (HyperShift / HCP): management vs workload cluster separation, hosted cluster lifecycle, and the operational model differences from standalone clusters.
• GitOps-based platform delivery in production: Argo CD or equivalent, declarative configuration, environment promotion, drift detection - everything-as-code as a working default.
• Multi-cluster fleet management and policy-as-code: Red Hat ACM or equivalent, Gatekeeper/OPA, placement and governance across a large cluster estate.
• Infrastructure-as-code and automation in production: Ansible and/or alternatives, plus working proficiency in at least one of Go, Python or Bash for automating platform operations.
• API-first platform design: authoring and versioning APIs consumed by other product teams, managing breaking changes and deprecation, Kubernetes API extension patterns (CRDs, operators).
• Observability engineering: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana or equivalent; defining SLIs/SLOs and designing alerting that reflects service health rather than component noise.
• Designing and operating fault-tolerant, highly available, high-throughput distributed systems, including platform integration with enterprise networking (load balancing, DNS, BGP concepts) and identity (LDAP/OIDC, certificate management).
• CKA/CKS and/or Red Hat certification (OpenShift Administration, OpenShift Virtualization, RHCE) a strong advantage.

Desirable Technology

• Large-scale VMware-to-OpenShift migration experience: MTV or equivalent tooling, and the operational realities of running a mixed VM/container estate during transition.
• Bare-metal provisioning at scale: ZTP, Metal3, host lifecycle management inside and outside the data centre.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise and software-defined storage as consumed by the platform - e.g. ODF/Ceph, SAN/NAS integration, S3-compatible object storage, CSI driver behaviour.
• Platform-level backup and DR for containerised and virtualised workloads - e.g. OADP/Velero, Veeam, or equivalent, including tested restore.

You might know us as a supermarket, technology company or even for our award-winning mobile network. Truth is, we’re all of those things, and much more. Our colleagues work with one goal in mind, helping to make every day a little better for our customers, colleagues and communities all over the world. No two customers are the same, neither are our colleagues. At Tesco, we champion a balance that lets you thrive both in and out of work. Spend 60% of your week collaborating with colleagues at our office locations or local sites and the rest remotely. Whether you're just kicking off your career, juggling passions, or navigating big life events, we're here to support you. We’re proud to be an accredited Disability Confident Leader, where everyone’s welcome. That’s why we commit to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process.