Engineering Manager – Reliability & Platform Engineering

Location: United Kingdom
Working model: Hybrid, with regular on-site collaboration (2 days a week)
Employment type: Full-time

About the Organisation

An established, multi-site consumer business is investing in the next stage of its technology and digital capabilities. With a substantial customer base and a broad digital footprint, the organisation is focused on improving the resilience, scalability, security and performance of the platforms that support its customer-facing and internal services.

The organisation is seeking an engineering leader who can strengthen reliability practices, develop engineering capability and help teams deliver dependable services as the technology environment continues to evolve.

The Role

As Engineering Manager for Reliability and Platform Engineering, you will lead a specialist engineering team responsible for service reliability, platform resilience and operational excellence. You will work with senior technology stakeholders and partner teams to shape the roadmap, improve engineering standards and ensure that reliability is built into services from design through production.

The role combines people leadership, technical direction and continuous improvement across a cloud-based environment supporting business-critical digital services.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop a team of reliability and platform engineers.
• Shape and deliver the roadmap for service reliability and platform engineering in partnership with technology leadership.
• Promote service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets, observability and automation.
• Improve the resilience, scalability, availability and performance of cloud-hosted services.
• Collaborate with software engineering, security, data and product teams to embed operational best practice.
• Drive the effective use of monitoring and observability capabilities to improve insight into service health.
• Lead incident reviews and learning, prioritising sustainable fixes and reducing repetitive operational work.
• Provide technical guidance across cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and distributed systems.

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate will combine strong engineering fundamentals with proven people leadership and the ability to influence change across a complex technology organisation.

Technical Experience

• Experience leading teams in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps or Cloud Infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures and public cloud platforms.
• Experience operating and improving large-scale distributed systems.
• Practical knowledge of observability, monitoring, automation and incident management.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes or similar container platforms, Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices.
• Understanding of reliability engineering principles and modern software delivery.

Leadership & Personal Attributes

• A supportive and effective people manager with strong coaching and mentoring skills.
• Able to translate technical strategy into measurable improvements.
• Confident communicator who can build relationships across technical and business teams.
• Pragmatic in balancing service reliability, delivery speed and customer impact.
• Committed to continuous improvement, knowledge sharing and engineering maturity.

The Opportunity

• A leadership role with scope to influence engineering practices and platform resilience.
• The opportunity to develop a specialist team and raise reliability standards across the organisation.
• Complex, business-critical services and a broad technology environment.
• A hybrid working arrangement with regular collaboration on site.
• A competitive package including bonus, pension, paid leave and employee wellbeing benefits.

Summary

This opportunity is suited to an engineering leader from an SRE, Platform Engineering, DevOps or Cloud Infrastructure background who wants to combine technical direction with team development. The focus is on building resilient, scalable and well-operated services while helping a consumer business strengthen its digital and technology capabilities.