Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering

Academic Key; Reading; Hybrid; GBP 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Keyloop is seeking a Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering in Reading, UK. The role leads a distributed team across platform and data engineering, driving API-first, cloud-native architectures and secure, scalable infrastructure.

You will shape the platform roadmap, integrate acquisitions, and enable AI-driven product capabilities. You will partner with CTO to guide data platforms, AI workloads, and low-code/no-code integrations, leveraging AWS, Terraform/Pulumi, Snowflake, and

Qualifications

• Leadership and mentoring of platform and data engineers.
• Define and refine the platform organisational structure and career pathways.
• APIs-first architecture and cloud-native strategy across AWS.
• Set security-by-design standards and compliance (ISO 27001, SOC 2).

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a diverse, distributed team of platform and data engineers.
• Co-own the multi-year platform engineering roadmap with Platform Product Leader.
• Architect and evolve the integration layer + API gateway for internal/external use.
• Design data platform for AI-driven capabilities with data lakes and pipelines.
• Drive agentic development lifecycle with AI-assisted engineering and MCP/LLM gateway.

Skills

Leadership

Platform engineering

Data engineering

API design

Cloud architecture

MLOps

AI

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Pulumi

n8n

Snowflake

Databricks

Kafka

EMR

Glue

Job description

Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering

Keyloop · UK (Reading)

Keyloop is a leading automotive retail software business, operating across 100+ markets and backed by Francisco Partners. As we accelerate our transition to a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform, Platform & Data Engineering sits at the heart of our technical strategy. This is a high-impact leadership role reporting directly to the CTO, responsible for setting and executing the platform strategy that enables Keyloop's product engineering teams, powers our data and AI capabilities, and provides the integration fabric for an acquisitive, multi-product business.

• Leadership & Team Development Lead and develop a diverse, distributed team of platform and data engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and clear career pathways to ensure high performance and professional growth. Build and refine the organisational structure of the platform function, including defining team topologies that support product engineering teams as internal customers. Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on developer productivity and platform reliability.
• Platform & Technology Strategy Ensure security, stability, and scalability are foundational properties of the platform - not afterthoughts - with clear ownership of reliability targets, security-by-design standards, and the capacity to serve a growing SaaS customer base across 100+ markets. Co-own the multi-year platform engineering roadmap with the Platform Product Leader, translating commercial and product priorities into a coherent engineering delivery plan. Lead the evolution of Keyloop’s shared services, API gateway, integration layer, and internal developer platform (IDP) to serve as the technical foundation across all product lines. Establish API-first as a non-negotiable architectural principle - every platform capability must be accessible via a well-governed, versioned API surface before any other access pattern is considered, enabling both internal product teams and external ecosystem partners to build reliably on top of Keyloop infrastructure. Drive cloud-native architecture decisions, leveraging AWS services and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform/Pulumi) to ensure scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency. Champion platform security-by-design, ensuring adherence to enterprise security standards, compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), and Keyloop's obligations as a custodian of sensitive automotive retail data.
• Integration & Acquisitive Platform Capability Architect and evolve the integration platform that enables Keyloop to onboard acquired businesses and codebases efficiently, reducing time-to-integration across M&A activity. Define and maintain shared platform capabilities including identity, authentication, multi-tenancy, data residency, and OEM connectivity standards. Ensure the platform acts as the enabling layer across Keyloop’s product portfolio, providing consistent APIs, event streaming, and shared infrastructure rather than duplicating capability across product teams. Design and deliver low-code/no-code integration capabilities that enable rapid, standardised connectivity with third-party systems across the automotive ecosystem, including OEM partners, dealer group platforms, and acquired businesses. Build on modern integration tooling (including n8n) to reduce time-to-integration and enable non-engineering teams to configure and operate integrations where appropriate.
• Data & AI Platform Lead the design and delivery of Keyloop's data platform, including data lakes, data pipelines, and analytical infrastructure to power BI, reporting, and AI-driven product capabilities. Build and operate the infrastructure layer for AI and ML workloads, including feature stores, model serving infrastructure, MLOps pipelines, and experimentation frameworks. Drive strategic adoption of technologies including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, EMR, Glue, Snowplow, and Kafka, ensuring robust data governance and quality practices. Partner closely with product and data science teams to ensure the data and AI platform directly enables Keyloop's AI product initiatives, including KARA and AIME.
• Enabling the Agentic Development Lifecycle Lead Keyloop's transition to an agentic software development lifecycle, defining the strategy, frameworks, and delivery model for AI-augmented engineering at scale. Develop and roll out the methodologies, toolchains, and workflows that enable engineering teams to work with AI coding agents, autonomous test generation, agentic PR review, and AI-assisted architecture decisions. Build and own the internal platform capabilities required to support agentic workloads, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) server infrastructure, LLM gateway services, context management systems, and agent orchestration layers. Drive the skills and capability development agenda across engineering, partnering with engineering directors to upskill teams in prompt engi