Director of Engineering - DTC Platform Engineering

SPEED & SPIRIT is what we look for in our candidates, defined by some simple values that inspire us to BE DRIVEN in our performance, BE VIBRANT in our sporting legacy, BE TOGETHER in our team spirit, and to let our individual talent and experience shine. Applying for a job at PUMA is easy. Simply click APPLY ONLINE and follow the steps to upload your application. YOUR MISSION The Director of Engineering - DTC Platform Engineering leads the organisation responsible for the shared engineering platforms, cloud foundations, integration capabilities, quality and performance engineering services, and developer tooling that enable DTC product teams to build and deliver secure, scalable and reliable software. This is a foundational leadership role: every product team, every consumer-facing capability, and every commerce transaction depends on the platforms, pipelines, and practices this organisation owns and operates. You will lead a cross-functional organisation spanning DevOps & CI/CD, Application Security, Test Automation, Enterprise Integrations, Performance Engineering, and Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure. You will work with the SRE & Operations team to define observability standards, SLO enablement, resilience requirements and production-readiness controls. Your remit is to ensure our engineering platform accelerates product delivery velocity without sacrificing quality or resilience - and that our cloud infrastructure is secure, cost-efficient, and built to scale. This role is a key engineering partner to all three product engineering organisations: Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, and Core Commerce Platform. Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership: • DevOps & CI/CD - build, test, and deployment pipelines, developer tooling, GitOps workflows and release engineering. • Performance Engineering - load testing, performance profiling, capacity planning, and Core Web Vitals governance. • Quality Engineering & Test Automation - Enterprise quality strategy, automated testing frameworks, release quality governance, test platforms, and engineering quality standards. • Integration Architecture & Platform Services - API management, integration architecture, event-driven platforms, shared services, and platform governance. • Cloud Architecture - infrastructure design, cloud provisioning, Kubernetes platform, networking, security, and cost optimisation. • Security & Compliance Engineering - Infrastructure security, secrets management, vulnerability management, data protection and security assurance. Platform Vision & Engineering Strategy • Define and execute the multi-year Platform Engineering strategy by establishing the technology vision for cloud infrastructure, developer experience, quality engineering, enterprise integrations and automation across the DTC estate. • Build a platform that acts as a strategic enabler for product engineering teams: reducing toil, accelerating delivery cycles, and raising the quality and reliability bar across all consumer-facing systems. • Own the platform engineering roadmap and promote adoption of platform capabilities. • Drive the adoption of platform engineering as a product discipline - treating internal engineering teams as customers and building self-service infrastructure and tooling accordingly. DevOps & CI/CD • Increase adoption of CI/CD capabilities across all product engineering organisations - enabling fast, safe, and automated delivery from code commit to production. • Govern branching strategies, environment topology (dev, staging, UAT, prod), and deployment runbooks across all product teams. • GitOps-based deployment workflows, progressive delivery patterns (canary releases, blue-green deployments, feature flags), and trunk-based development practices. • Drive developer experience (DevEx) improvements - fast build times, reliable pipelines, self-service environment provisioning, and clear developer documentation. • Establish release governance processes that balance deployment speed with change risk management, particularly for high-impact commerce events such as sale periods and product launches. Quality Engineering & Test Automation • Define and execute Quality Engineering strategy across all DTC platforms, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle. • Define and evolve shared test automation frameworks covering functional, regression, API, integration, and end-to-end testing. • Establish quality standards, metrics, and governance to improve release confidence and reduce production defects. • Enable engineering teams through reusable testing capabilities, tooling, and quality engineering best practices. Performance Engineering • Define and execute the Performance Engineering strategy, ensuring applications and platforms meet scalability, reliability, and user experience objectives. • Establish performance standards, capacity planning practices, and non-functional requirements across all product domains. • Lead performance optimization initiatives across applications, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and consumer experiences. • Govern performance KPIs, Core Web Vitals, and platform readiness for major business events and traffic peaks. Security & Compliance Engineering • Own the security engineering strategy across cloud infrastructure, platform services, and software delivery pipelines. • Drive DevSecOps adoption through automated security controls, vulnerability management, and policy enforcement. • Implement and govern platform controls for identity, secrets management, cloud security posture and compliance automation in collaboration with the central infrastructure team. • Partner with enterprise security teams to ensure adherence to security compliance requirements. • Foster a culture of secure-by-design engineering across all product and platform teams. Integration Architecture & Engineering • Own the integration platform vision & strategy, capability roadmap, priorities & adoption across the DTC ecosystem. • Lead adoption of API-first and event-driven platform capabilities that accelerate delivery and reduce integration complexity. • Establish reusable integration frameworks, shared services, and platform governance to drive consistency and operational excellence. • Partner with Product Engineering, Data, and Architecture teams to ensure integration capabilities support current and future business needs. AI Engineering Platforms & Automation • Define and evolve the strategy for AI-enabled engineering platforms, capabilities and practices across the DTC engineering organisation. • Establish reusable platform capabilities, standards and guardrails that enable teams to safely adopt AI technologies and accelerate delivery. • Drive the adoption of AI-assisted and automated engineering practices across the software development lifecycle, improving developer productivity, quality and operational efficiency. • Evaluate emerging AI technologies, platform capabilities and engineering practices, translating them into scalable and practical solutions that create business and engineering value. • Ensure AI-enabled capabilities are implemented with appropriate controls for security, compliance, observability, cost management and responsible use. Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership • Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-disciplinary team of DevOps engineers, QA automation engineers, performance engineers, cloud architects, security engineers. • Operate as a trusted platform partner to the Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, and Core Commerce Platform engineering directors - understanding their needs and proactively improving the platform beneath them. • Build strong relationships with Security, Finance (FinOps), and Infrastructure procurement stakeholders. • Represent platform engineering in architecture review boards, incident reviews, and engineering leadership forums. YOUR TALENT 15+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a senior engineering leadership role owning platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering organisations. Proven ability to define platform architecture strategy, technology standards, infrastructure modernisation roadmaps, and engineering guardrails that support scalability, resilience, and security. Experience building internal developer platforms, self-service engineering capabilities, and software delivery practices that improve developer productivity, reliability, governance, and time-to-market. Experience in Cloud Native Infrastructure - Kubernetes, compute & runtime services, Cloud CDN, IAM, VPC, and monitoring & observability tooling. GCP experience preferred. Proven experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines at scale - GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, ArgoCD, Spinnaker, or equivalent. Experience in Kubernetes platform engineering - cluster operations, Helm, service mesh, and workload autoscaling. Demonstrable test automation leadership - experience defining quality engineering strategy and building shared test automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, RestAssured, k6, or equivalent). Performance engineering expertise - load testing tools (k6, Gatling, JMeter), APM platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace), and front-end performance profiling. Infrastructure-as-code proficiency - Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent; GitOps workflows with ArgoCD or Flux. Understanding of modern security engineering practices, including secrets management, application security (SAST/DAST), cloud security posture management, vulnerability management, data protection, and secure software delivery. Master's or Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field. Leadership Expectations: At PUMA, Directors are expected to operate as enterprise leaders who shape strategy, build capability, and create an environment where teams can deliver exceptional outcomes at speed and scale. Successful leaders combine commercial acumen, technical excellence, and people leadership while embodying the mindset and behaviours that define PUMA's culture. Strategic Thinking & Vision Translate ambitious business goals into clear, executable technology strategies and roadmaps. Demonstrate the courage to challenge conventional thinking and advocate for innovative solutions that create long-term value. Operate effectively in ambiguity, providing clarity, direction, and confidence for teams and stakeholders. Balance immediate business priorities with long-term scalability, sustainability, and consumer impact. Ownership & Accountability Take end-to-end ownership of outcomes, driving execution with determination and a relentless focus on results. Set high standards for quality, reliability, and operational excellence while fostering a culture of accountability. Navigate setbacks and changing priorities with resilience, maintaining momentum through complexity and uncertainty. Make difficult decisions when required and stand behind them with conviction and integrity. People & Team Leadership Build, develop, and retain diverse, high-performing teams capable of delivering at scale. Foster an environment of trust, inclusion, collaboration, and mutual respect where individuals can thrive. Create opportunities for learning, growth, and continuous development while empowering teams with autonomy and accountability. Celebrate successes, recognise contributions, and cultivate a culture where high performance and enjoyment go hand in hand. Collaboration & Stakeholder Management Build strong partnerships across Product, Design, Data, Marketing, Operations, and Business teams to achieve shared outcomes. Influence effectively across all levels of the organisation through credibility, transparency, and strong communication. Demonstrate confidence in decision-making while remaining open to challenge, feedback, and diverse perspectives. Lead with a team-first mindset, breaking down silos and enabling collaboration across functions and geographies. Innovation & Continuous Learning Champion modern engineering practices, AI-native ways of working, and a culture of experimentation. Encourage curiosity, learning, and thoughtful risk-taking to unlock new opportunities for consumers and the business. Create space for innovation while maintaining a disciplined approach to execution and delivery. Continuously raise the bar on engineering excellence, operational maturity, and consumer experience. Commercial & Consumer Mindset Understand the connection between technology decisions, consumer experience, and business performance. Make decisions that balance innovation, speed, quality, and commercial impact. Maintain a strong consumer-first perspective, ensuring technology investments create meaningful value for consumers. Demonstrate sound judgment and confidence when translating business priorities into engineering outcomes. Building PUMA's Future Act as a visible culture builder and role model as PUMA continues to scale its DTC Engineering organisation. Embrace the opportunity to build teams, capabilities, and ways of working from the ground up. Lead with energy, optimism, and purpose, inspiring others to contribute to a shared vision and ambitious goals. Foster an environment where bold thinking, determination, collaboration, and enjoyment are all essential ingredients of success. PUMA provides equal opportunities for all job applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or disability. Equality for all is one of the core principles at PUMA and we do not tolerate any form of harassment or discrimination. At PUMA, every application is reviewed by real people who are committed to fairness, transparency, and equal opportunity - no matter your background, identity, or ensure our process stays true to these values, no automated systems or AI tools are used to make hiring decisions. Every decision is made by real people -with real judgment and accountability. We may use functions supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to carry out isolated organizational steps, such as scheduling interviews. These functions have no influence on decisions in the application process. We believe in creating spaces where everyone is welcome, celebrated, and empowered to contribute authentically. Because at PUMA, whoever wants to play, can play. PUMA is a global sports brand creating footwear, apparel, and accessories that inspire athletes and everyday movers. The PUMA Group owns PUMA, Cobra Golf, and stichd, operates in 120+ countries, and has around 22,000 employees worldwide.