Head of Platform
Salary: £80,000 - £90,000 + Bonus (up-to 20%)
Location: North West (twice month office requirement)
Benefits: 27 days holiday plus public holidays, enhanced pension, private medical, family, sickness and insurance benefits.
Build, scale and protect a modern fintech platform
We’re working with an established financial technology business operating at the heart of the UK insurance ecosystem. Backed by a major household-name group, the business provides critical technology that underpins customer journeys for some of the UK’s best-known comparison brands.
As the organisation continues to mature its engineering practices and platform capability, we’re now seeking a Head of Platform to take ownership of cloud infrastructure, deployment practices and operational resilience ensuring the platform is secure, scalable and fit for long-term growth.
This is a hands-on leadership role: accountable for platform outcomes, risk and reliability, while leading and developing a small specialist team (currently c.3 people).
The opportunity
You’ll sit at the intersection of engineering, delivery and risk, working closely with senior technical leaders and agile squads to enable high-quality software delivery.
The platform estate is modern, cloud-based and business-critical. Your role is to ensure it remains:
You’ll be trusted to set direction, raise standards and act as a calm technical authority when it matters most.
What you’ll be responsible for
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Owning the cloud platform and infrastructure strategy, within a predominantly AWS-based environment
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Leading and evolving Infrastructure-as-Code practices (Terraform / OpenTofu / Ansible) across multi-region environments
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Ensuring production systems are highly available, secure and resilient
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Driving platform observability, incident readiness and on-call effectiveness
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Partnering with engineering teams to enable fast, safe deployment of software
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Maintaining strong security and compliance controls, supporting certifications such as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS
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Acting as a senior technical voice with stakeholders across technology and the wider business
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Line-managing and developing a small, experienced platform team, setting clear expectations and coaching for growth
What we’re looking for
This role will suit someone who has owned modern cloud platforms inside a software-led organisation rather than traditional IT services or purely enterprise infrastructure.
You’re likely to bring:
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Proven leadership of a platform, DevOps or SRE-style team
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Deep experience operating AWS-based environments in production
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Strong, practical understanding of Infrastructure as Code
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Experience supporting software engineering teams, not just internal IT
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Confidence working with modern data platforms and cloud-native services
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A solid grasp of networking, security and internet fundamentals
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Credibility in regulated or risk-aware environments
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The judgement to balance delivery speed, stability and compliance
Just as importantly, you enjoy leading people setting direction, developing capability and creating a calm, accountable culture.
Don’t meet every single requirement? At Realise, we are dedicated to helping our clients build diverse, inclusive and authentic workplaces, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every requirement, we would encourage you to apply anyway — you might just be the candidate we’re looking for!
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