Platform Engineering Manager

This is a senior leadership opportunity for someone who combines strong people leadership, product thinking, and the technical credibility to influence experienced engineers. You will lead the platform engineering team through its next stage of maturity, creating a high-trust, high ownership culture and embedding a genuine platform-as-a-product mindset that is owned by the whole team.

The Cloud Platform Engineering Manager owns the vision, delivery, and operation of our internal cloud platform services, treating those services as a product and our delivery teams as customers. You will be the ambassador for platform thinking across the organisation, the person who makes the platform something teams choose because it is genuinely the easiest, safest path. You will set the technical bar and arbitrate the hard architecture and trade-off decisions, but your primary value is in growing the team, shaping the product, and shifting the culture, not in being the team's most active engineer.

The role sits at the intersection of people, product, and operations, with a strong emphasis on reducing cognitive load for delivery teams, raising the engineering bar, and building a healthy, high-trust team that owns its outcomes.

Your key responsibilities

• People leadership and team health This is the heart of the role.
• Take the team on a journey: build a shared sense of purpose, raise the level of ownership, and grow individuals so the team's capability outlasts any single person, including you.
• Line manage, coach, and develop a team of platform engineers: performance, career growth, and day-to-day support. Create a safe, high-trust environment where engineers can learn, experiment, challenge, and improve without fear.
• Build genuine shared ownership for platform outcomes, quality, and reliability, so standards are held by the team rather than imposed on it.
• Grow the team's product instincts and customer empathy, so the platform-as-a-product mindset becomes how the team thinks by default.

Platform-as-a-product leadership and advocacy

• Own the platform vision, value proposition, and roadmap, grounded in real internal customer needs and measurable outcomes.
• Embed the product mindset into the team: treat stream-aligned teams as customers, build strong feedback loops, and iterate based on real usage and pain points.
• Be the platform's ambassador and envoy across the organisation: build relationships with engineering, security, architecture, and delivery leaders, and make the case for platform thinking so the platform is chosen, not mandated.
• Connect platform work to business and customer impact, so the team understands the "why" and stakeholders understand the value.

Cloud platform services & paved roads

• Set the direction for a portfolio of cloud platform services (for example landing zones, CI/CD enablement, IaC patterns, identity and access guardrails, runtime patterns, observability, vulnerability scanning, backup and DR), and guide the team in building and evolving them.
• Ensure services are self-service, discoverable, and opinionated, making the secure and reliable path the easiest path.
• Reduce cognitive load by curating complexity on behalf of delivery teams, rather than pushing it onto them.

Operational excellence & platform health

• Own the production operation of platform services through the team: clear service ownership, SLOs and SLAs, error budgets, on-call, and incident management.
• Build strong observability for platform services and connect technical signals to customer and product impact.
• Drive improvements in reliability, security, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation, including the use of Azure Well-Architected reviews.
• Prefer mechanisms over manual process: policy-as-code, automation, guardrails, and continuous controls that scale with adoption.

Governance, risk, and enablement

• Establish safe boundaries for teams building and running in Azure, balancing autonomy with compliance and risk management
• Work with security, architecture, and delivery teams to ensure platform services actively reduce risk, rather than shifting it
• Support delivery teams during security incidents and resilience events, improving the platform based on real failures

Technical leadership and credibility

• Set and uphold the technical bar for production-grade engineering, security, and operability across platform services.
• Make and arbitrate the hard architecture and design decisions, and lead technical reviews.
• Lead by example on engineering discipline: testing, automation, observability, documentation, and continuous improvement.

What you'll need to succeed

• A track record of leading and growing engineering teams of 5-6 senior engineers: coaching, developing, and building high-trust, high-ownership cultures.
• Demonstrable ability to take a team on a journey and shift how it thinks, not just manage its throughput.
• Experience owning a platform, internal product, or service as a product, with real customer feedback loops and a self-service over gatekeeping bias. Familiarity with Team Topologies or similar thinking is an advantage.
• Strong stakeholder and influencing skills: comfortable being the advocate and envoy for a way of working across engineering, security, and architecture.
• A deep and credible cloud engineering background (Azure and infrastructure-as-code) sufficient to set the technical bar, arbitrate architecture, and earn the team's trust. You do not need to be hands-on in the codebase daily.
• Experience of owning production services, including incident management, SLOs, and reliability improvements.
• Focus on outcomes: values impact over activity. Ownership mindset: accountable for results, trade-offs, and follow-through.
• Continuous improvement mindset: curious, reflective, and always raising the bar. Emotional intelligence as a leader to build trust, clarity, and psychological safety.

Values

Our values are central to our vision, as they represent how we collaborate to continually deliver for our customers:

• Accountability: We own our actions and shape our success on the results we deliver
• Innovation: We tackle challenges with fresh thinking and bold ideas
• Teamwork: We work together, recognising we can't do this without each other
• Trust: We build trust on integrity, transparency and mutual respect