Director of Platform Engineering

Job description

DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING Location: UK preferred, office preferred Contract: Permanent full-time Start Date: ASAP ABOUT THE ROLE As Director of Platform Engineering, you are responsible for building the shared foundations that make Hawk-Eye's technology organisation easier to trust, easier to scale, and easier to build on. Your mission is to build a lean technical organisation with AI at the heart of it, capable of scaling through technology more than people. Your clients are product and services teams seeking reliable infrastructure, available data, and scalable APIs. This technical leadership role sits at the centre of Hawk-Eye engineering defines and builds the foundations for platform and data engineering, enabling AI-driven workflows in product and technology development and capable to support mission critical systems. You will lead and manage Hawk-Eye’s Platform Engineering function. This includes domains such as Cloud Engineering, Data Engineering, Developer Experience, as well as other domains incubated in Platform Engineering. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES ENABLING AI-READY FOUNDATIONS - Build the platform, data, and governance conditions required for AI-enabled software delivery to scale safely. - Ensure shared services, modular interfaces, and governed data access create the right foundations for future AI acceleration. - Provide leadership for internal engineering enablement through the Developer Experience function. - Define, build, and own Hawk-Eye’s internal Platform-as-a-Service. TEAM LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT - Build and lead a high-calibre Platform Engineering function with strong technical credibility and operational judgement. - Hire, develop, and align engineering leaders and specialists across platform, cloud, SRE, and data disciplines. - Foster a culture of accountability, clarity, calm execution, and continuous improvement. - Act as a senior internal leader who can bring structure to complexity without becoming bureaucratic. - Live by and advocate Hawk-Eye’s values: Be Owners, Be Brave, Be Inclusive. ENGINEERING STANDARDS AND SHARED WAYS OF WORKING - Create practical standards to enable strong reliability, platform quality, operational readiness, and shared data governance across the whole of Hawk-Eye’s engineering. - Balance central consistency with enough flexibility for different product and domain needs. - Partner with product engineering leaders so shared platform and data standards improve delivery speed. OPERATIONAL LEADERSHIP - Identify systemic reliability risks, fragile dependencies, and operational bottlenecks early, and drive resolution. - Introduce visible service health, ownership, and numeric baselines for the critical systems under your remit. - Use major tournaments, flagship customers, and real operating pressure as proving grounds for improved resilience and trust. - Transition the wider organisation to structured and disciplined operational management. ABOUT YOU You are a strong technology leader with real experience building shared platforms and data capabilities in organisations where reliability, scale, and coordination matter. You understand that the hard part is not only choosing the right architecture. It is creating the ownership, standards, operating discipline, and trust that make good architecture useful in practice. You are credible with senior engineers, comfortable in operationally demanding environments, and able to move between cloud infrastructure, data foundations, organisational design, and delivery reality without losing the plot. You know how to centralise what must become shared capability without hollowing out the autonomy and judgement of teams that build on top of it. You care about engineering quality, but you care just as much about business consequence. You know that reliability protects customer trust, governed data creates leverage, and shared standards only matter when they make the organisation materially better at delivering outcomes.