Head of Platform Engineering

Overview

Head of Platform Engineering role at BibliU – join to apply.

Position

Position Title : Head of Platform Engineering

Reports to : Chief Technology Officer

Location : Remote (UK / EU preferred)

Contract type : Permanent

About BibliU

BibliU is an award-winning education company that provides Day 1 access to affordable course materials, making learning more equitable and effective, in addition to providing campus store management. We partner with over 3,000 educational publishers, including Pearson, Oxford University Press, and Wiley, to offer a wide range of high-quality content to students. Our platform provides rich engagement data to academics and allows students to find information faster. We have disrupted the textbook industry by reducing the cost of education significantly and increasing publisher sales.

Founded in late-2015, we are a rapidly growing company transforming the way students and educators access and interact with learning materials. Our revenue has grown rapidly, with 150% YoY growth in the last three years. We raised $21m in a Series B funding round led by Nesta Impact Investments, with participation from Guinness Asset Management, Stonehage Fleming, and Oxford Sciences Enterprises.

In late 2023, we acquired Texas Book Company (now 'BibliU Campus') in order to deliver a more complete solution of products and services to higher ed students, faculty and administrators across the US. Since the addition of BibliU Campus, we have seen a dramatic increase in customers due to a much improved product market fit. We are very excited about our growth and are expanding the team to meet our new market potential!

We are a diverse and inclusive team of professionals who are passionate about education and technology. Our culture is fast-paced, innovative, and dynamic, and we are always looking for talented individuals to join our team.

Position Overview

As Head of Platform Engineering at BibliU, you'll be the architect of our technical foundation during a period of explosive growth. This isn't about maintaining the status quo—you'll be reshaping how we scale infrastructure to support millions of students across continents while dramatically reducing our operational overhead.

The Challenge : We've grown 150% year-over-year for three years running. Our recent acquisition has accelerated growth even further. Now we're planning for 10x growth over the next five years while expanding into additional products and services. What got us here won't get us there. We need someone who can architect systems that won't just handle today's scale, but can elegantly expand to support entirely new business lines while serving tens of millions of students across continents.

The Opportunity : You'll have direct influence over technical architecture decisions that impact global education. Your infrastructure choices will determine whether students in Manchester or Texas can access their materials instantly. Your cost optimisation work directly translates to making education more affordable. Your security implementations protect the academic futures of millions.

What Makes This Different : Most platform roles are about keeping the lights on. This role is about building the electrical grid from the ground up. You'll start as the technical leader of a 4-person platform team, but your real challenge is architecting both the systems and the organization structure needed to support 8-10x growth. You'll be working at the intersection of hands-on technical leadership, team building, and strategic platform design—shaping not just what we build, but how we build it as the team scales alongside our business.

Your Impact Areas

• Infrastructure Evolution : Transform our current AWS estate from a collection of services into a coherent, multi-region platform that can support 8-10x growth over the next five years. You'll be making architectural decisions that need to seamlessly scale from our current footprint to supporting entirely new product lines and services, handling everything from peak registration periods to the launch of completely new business verticals without missing a beat.
• Cost Intelligence : Turn infrastructure spend from a necessary evil into a competitive advantage. We're not looking for someone to just cut costs—we need strategic thinking about where to invest, where to optimise, and how to build cost awareness into our engineering culture.
• Security Leadership : Own security posture across our entire technical stack. This goes beyond compliance checkboxes to building security-first thinking into everything we do, from data architecture to deployment pipelines.
• Data Platform Modernisation : Lead the evolution of our data infrastructure to serve two new critical constituencies, in addition to existing in-app analytics : modernising retail systems for hundreds of physical campus bookstores (acquired through Texas Book Company) while simultaneously powering sophisticated account growth analytics for our internal teams. This dual challenge requires building unified data systems that can handle both real-time inventory management across retail locations and complex customer journey analytics for our digital platform growth.
• Engineering Enablement : Build platforms and tooling that make our engineering teams more productive, not more constrained. Your infrastructure decisions should make deploying safer and faster, not slower and more complex.

Current Technical Landscape

What We Need From You

What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart

Our benefits are all aimed at supporting a healthy work-life balance and cultivating a company culture where you can bring your whole, human self to work.

Here's what we offer :

We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds, experiences and identities to apply. Each new hire is an opportunity for us to bring in a different perspective and BibliU is committed to building an inclusive and supportive workplace where everyone can do rewarding work.

Please note : We do not work with external recruiters / recruitment agencies. This position will be filled directly by BibliU and we kindly request that external recruiters / recruitment agencies refrain from submitting candidates for this role.

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