Associate Director, Platform Engineering

Role Summary

The Associate Director – Platform Engineering leads the engineering function responsible for designing, developing, and operating a secure, scalable platform that supports AI workloads in a modern, containerized platform environment. The role provides technical and people leadership across multiple engineering teams, establishes engineering standards and best practices, and ensures successful delivery of enterprise platform capabilities through close collaboration with Product, Architecture, Operations, Security, and other stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop multiple engineering teams through their team leads, providing technical guidance, coaching, and performance oversight.
• Define and drive the engineering strategy, technical direction, and platform architecture aligned with business objectives.
• Oversee the design, development, deployment, and support of enterprise platform services using Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Kafka, and modern web technologies.
• Ensure platform solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, maintainable, and operationally resilient across distributed platform environments.
• Establish and continuously improve software engineering practices, including code quality, CI/CD, release management, incident management, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Operations teams to deliver platform capabilities and resolve cross-functional dependencies.
• Review technical designs and implementation approaches to ensure architectural consistency and engineering quality.
• Monitor delivery progress, manage risks, and ensure projects are delivered within agreed timelines.
• Support production operations by driving platform stability, performance improvements, and incident resolution.
• Mentor engineering leaders and build technical capability across the engineering organisation.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Significant experience in software engineering and technical leadership within enterprise environments.
• Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams or large-scale platform engineering initiatives.
• Strong technical expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and Kafka.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures and private cloud platforms.
• Good understanding of AI platform workloads and enterprise platform engineering.
• Strong knowledge of software development lifecycle, DevOps practices, release management, and production support.
• Excellent leadership, stakeholder management, communication, and decision-making skills.
• Ability to balance strategic leadership with practical technical oversight and mentoring.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI platforms or data-intensive enterprise systems.
• Familiarity with enterprise security, observability, resilience, and compliance practices.
• Experience working in matrix organisations with multiple stakeholders.