Head of Platform

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll set the platform strategy and grow the team, but you’ll also write code, review designs and prototype tooling. A key part of the role is growing our data operations capability, so that data pipelines are as reliable, observable and self-serve as the rest of the platform., This role sits at Head of Engineering level on the UNiDAYS Software Engineering Career Framework (people manager track).

• Engineering Core: Influence
• Engineering Craft: Influence
• Quality: Evangelise
• Systems Engineering: Evangelise
• Engineering Strategy: Evangelise

• People Management: Evangelise

• Job responsibilities: Define and own the platform strategy and roadmap, treating the platform as an internal product with engineers as its customers.
• Build self-service “golden paths” (service templates, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning and infrastructure-as-code modules) that engineers can pick up and use without help.
• Grow our data ops capability: reliable, observable and well-tested data pipelines across orchestration, transformation and the warehouse (e.g. Airflow, dbt, Redshift), with self-service ways for engineers to publish and use data.
• Build data quality, lineage and monitoring into the pipelines rather than bolting them on afterwards.
• Own observability, reliability and incident practice across the platform, including SLOs, alerting, runbooks and blameless post-incident learning.
• Improve developer experience and measure it. Track outcomes such as lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and platform adoption, and act on what you find.
• Embed security, compliance and cloud cost awareness into the platform by default, so the right thing is also the easy thing.
• Stay technically engaged: contribute code, take part in design and code reviews, and prototype new tooling, while keeping a focus on leadership and delegation.
• Build, structure and mentor the platform and data ops teams, and help team members grow their technical and leadership capabilities.
• Champion clear communication between platform, product engineering, data and security, and make sure the platform is shaped by what teams actually need.
• Stay up to date on platform engineering, DevOps and DataOps practices, including AI-assisted tooling, and keep looking for ways to raise the productivity of the whole engineering function.

• Job requirements: Led and managed multiple engineering teams, ideally including platform, infrastructure, DevOps or data engineering teams.
• A proven track record of building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling that engineers actually adopted.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native environments (AWS).
• Experience building and running production data pipelines and the tooling around them (e.g. Airflow, dbt, a cloud data warehouse).
• Strong coding skills (e.g. Python, Go or TypeScript) and a desire to stay hands-on.
• Shown the ability to set technical direction and turn business goals into a platform roadmap.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and stakeholder management skills, and able to win adoption through influence rather than mandate.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with multi-cloud environments (AWS and GCP).
• Experience with DataOps practices such as data contracts, data quality frameworks and lineage.
• Experience with observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) at scale
• Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.
• Experience using AI/LLM tooling to speed up engineering workflows.

• The chance to shape how every engineer at UNiDAYS builds, ships and runs software and data.
• A collaborative and supportive work environment that fosters innovation.
• A competitive salary and benefits package.
• A chance to make a significant contribution to a growing team and to build a platform function with real ownership.

Job benefits: This is your opportunity to Join the world’s largest student verification network and help shape the future of how brands connect with the next generation. We engage a community of 23M+ verified students and graduates across 115 markets, making us a truly global platform. Our brand is a powerhouse in the UK, and we’re rapidly accelerating our presence worldwide-especially in the US, Germany, India, France, Canada, and Australia.

We partner with 850+ of the world’s biggest brands, bringing their products and services to the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s professionals-driving engagement, building affinity, and delivering real results.

We offer a fast-paced, fun, and social working environment where you can truly make an impact. We believe work should enhance and complement your life, which is why we provide a hybrid working model. You will work together in person a minimum of 2 days per week and work from home for up to 3 days a week.

We work hard at UNiDAYS, and we believe in fair compensation for that hard work. That’s why we’re proud to offer all employees full access to our comprehensive benefits package.

Our perks include: 25 days holiday per year increasing with length of service, plus bank holidays Competitive salaries 4pm finishes every Friday Company pension scheme Private health insurance (BUPA) Dental Insurance (BUPA) Income protection policy Life assurance policy Employee Assistance Program Enhanced parental leave pay Regular team building activities £150 pounds towards your home office set up We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.