Head of Platforms - Technology, Infrastructure and Operations

RELX Group
Charing Cross, United Kingdom
2 days ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours
Languages
English
Experience level
Senior

Job location

Charing Cross, United Kingdom

Tech stack

Artificial Intelligence
Cloud Engineering
Code Generation
Continuous Integration
Systems Development Life Cycle
AI Platforms

Job description

  • Platform Strategy & Vision
  • Contribute to the definition and assert the delivery needs related to the platform strategy in line with Elsevier's policies and standards.
  • Translate strategic objectives (reuse, DevEx, GenAI/automation) into clear plane roadmaps.
  • Establish Elsevier's "platform as a product" operating model-integrating developer experience, governance, and self-service capabilities.
  • Leadership & Organization Design
  • Build and lead a global platform organization (~95 initial with the potential to grow to 125 people over time) across functional planes (Core Platform, Data & AI Services, Observability, Guardrails, etc.).
  • Partner closely with the TIO Strategy Lead, Chief Infrastructure Architect, and Change Management to align operational and cultural changes with delivery models/organizational needs.
  • Continue our evolution towards an engineering-led and automation first organization.
  • Developer Experience & Enablement
  • Oversee delivery of the internal developer portal (Backstage) and golden path standards for onboarding, CI/CD, and observability.
  • Embed developer experience metrics (DORA, SPACE) into delivery performance and drive measurable improvement.
  • Champion reuse and inner sourcing across the platform community.
  • AI & Automation Integration
  • Integrate AI assistants, code generation, and AI-augmented testing within the platform to accelerate development and reduce toil.
  • Ensure the technology goals of evolving to an AI-driven SDLC are incorporated into the overall approach of the platform.
  • Drive a culture of "secure and efficient by default" through embedded automation and policy guardrails.
  • Operational Excellence
  • Ensure platform services and related workloads are reliable, observable, and cost-optimized (FinOps and sustainability focus).
  • Oversee on-call and resiliency strategies aligned to new platform operating models.
  • Measure and report on platform maturity, adoption, and developer satisfaction across Elsevier.
  • Collaboration & Influence
  • Work cross-functionally with TIO leadership, ISDP, and Business Unit CTOs to align platform capabilities with product and regulatory requirements.
  • Represent Elsevier externally in engineering and developer productivity communities.
  • Ensure close alignment with the Business Unit-aligned (also known as stream aligned) cloud engineering communities to foster adoption of platform capabilities, via Pods and other enablement functions.

Requirements

  • Technical Leadership: 15+ years in software/platform/operational engineering; proven success building and operating internal products, platforms or large-scale developer enablement systems.
  • Strategic Execution: Experience leading transformations, balancing build/buy strategies, and scaling organizations.
  • Product Mindset: Strong background in "platform as a product," developer experience, and service ownership models.
  • People Leadership: Track record of growing distributed engineering teams with clear boundaries, autonomy, and accountability.
  • AI Fluency: Familiarity with GenAI integration in SDLC and developer workflows.
  • Operational Acumen: Strong grounding in SRE, observability, FinOps, and secure-by-design engineering.
  • Influence & Communication: Able to partner across architecture, product, and business teams; comfortable operating at both executive and engineering levels.

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