Platform Engineering Manager

Your key responsibilities

This is a senior, dual-mode leadership role for someone who can operate equally well as a technical practitioner and a people-focused engineering manager. The Cloud Platform Engineering Manager owns the vision, delivery, and operation of internal cloud platform services - treating those services as a product with internal development teams as customers. They'll remain hands on technically (architecture, IaC, code, incidents) while also leading a team, managing stakeholder relationships across engineering, security, and architecture, and driving the cultural shift toward platform thinking. The role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and operations, with a strong emphasis on reducing cognitive load for delivery teams, raising the engineering bar, and building a healthy, high trust team.

Platform as a Product leadership

• Own the platform vision, value proposition, and roadmap for cloud platform services, grounded in internal customer needs and measurable outcomes.
• Treat stream aligned teams as customers, maintaining strong feedback loops and iterating the platform based on real usage and pain points.
• Evangelise platform thinking across the organisation: the platform should be chosen, not mandated.

Hands on engineering leadership

Act as a senior engineer within the platform team, contributing directly to:

• Architecture and design decisions
• Code, IaC, and platform automation
• Technical reviews and quality standards
• Incident response and post incident learning

• Set the technical bar for production grade engineering, security, and operability across platform services.
• Lead by example in applying engineering discipline: testing, automation, observability, documentation, and continuous improvement.

Cloud platform services & paved roads

• Build and evolve a portfolio of cloud platform services (e.g. landing zones, CI/CD enablement, IaC patterns, identity and access guardrails, runtime patterns, observability, vulnerability scanning, backup and DR)
• Ensure services are self service, discoverable, and opinionated, making the secure and reliable path the easiest path.
• Reduce cognitive load by curating complexity, not pushing it onto delivery teams.

Operational excellence & platform health

Own the production operation of platform services:

• Clear service ownership
• SLOs / SLAs and error budgets
• On call and incident management
• Post incident reviews and learning loops

• Build strong observability for platform services and connect technical signals to customer and product impact where possible.
• 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

People leadership & team health

• Line manage and grow the platform engineering team: coaching, mentoring, performance management, and career development.
• Create a safe, high trust environment where engineers can learn, experiment, and improve.
• Build a strong sense of shared ownership for platform outcomes, quality, and reliability.