Head of Platform Engineering

Role Overview:

The Head of Platform Engineering leads TIME Retail's infrastructure, site reliability, DevSecOps and platform scalability functions, ensuring platforms are secure, resilient and operationally ready to support business growth. Reporting to the CIO, this role is accountable for modernizing and scaling the technology backbone, maintaining IRP/DRP readiness, enforcing security policies and enabling engineering teams to deliver with confidence.

This is a senior, hands-on leadership position for a systems-focused leader who thrives on ensuring high availability, operational discipline and enterprise-grade security across all platforms.

Key Responsibilities:

Platform, Infrastructure & Reliability Ownership

• Own the design, operation and evolution of TIME Retail's infrastructure and platform services.
• Lead site reliability engineering practices to meet strict SLAs for uptime, latency and system performance.
• Oversee DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines to ensure secure, reliable and automated deployments.
• Drive modernization initiatives that improve performance, reliability and scalability in line with long-term architecture plans.

Security, Compliance & Governance

• Enforce security policies across all platform and infrastructure layers.
• Ensure readiness for Incident Response Plans (IRP) and Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) through regular testing and updates.
• Partner with Cybersecurity teams to maintain compliance with regulatory, data privacy and audit requirements.
• Lead platform hardening, vulnerability remediation and ongoing security monitoring.

Architecture & Scalability

• Define and maintain the platform architecture roadmap, ensuring modularity, scalability and interoperability across systems.
• Lead modernization efforts to adopt cloud-native, containerized and event-driven architectures where appropriate.
• Implement infrastructure-as-code, observability frameworks, automated failover and performance benchmarking.
• Ensure platform designs support future growth, high availability and seamless integration with other systems.

Operational Readiness & IT Support Enablement

• Ensure operational readiness of all platforms to support business and customer-facing systems.
• Oversee internal IT support tiers (L1, L2, L3) for technical issues escalated by Customer Care, Product and other business units, ensuring timely triage, resolution and documentation according to SLAs.
• Maintain operational runbooks, escalation paths and incident workflows for efficiency and consistency.
• Monitor and improve SLA compliance for incident response and resolution times.

Team Leadership & Development

• Build and lead a high-performing Platform Engineering team with skills in infrastructure, cloud, security and site reliability.
• Establish clear KPIs, responsibilities and career paths for platform engineers and support specialists.
• Foster a culture of operational discipline, resilience and continuous improvement.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with the Head of Engineering to ensure platform capabilities align with application delivery needs.
• Collaborate with Product, Operations and Cybersecurity to meet business and security objectives.
• Serve as the final technical escalation point for infrastructure and platform-related incidents.
• Partner closely with Finance, Product, and Business stakeholders to evolve TimePay's capabilities, balancing business requirements with platform scalability, compliance and technical feasibility.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Experience

• 10+ years in platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering, with at least 5 years in leadership roles.
• Proven track record in running mission-critical, high-availability platforms in telco, fintech, or regulated environments.
• Experience implementing IRP/DRP frameworks, platform security policies and DevSecOps practices.
• Prior exposure to multi-tier technical support (L1, L2, L3) in a 24/7 environment.

Technical Skills

• Expert in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Kubernetes and infrastructure automation.
• Strong knowledge of platform scalability, system integration and middleware.
• Proficient in monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.) and infrastructure-as-code frameworks such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Deep understanding of disaster recovery, high availability and fault-tolerant systems.

Leadership Traits

• Strategic systems thinker with a reliability-first mindset.
• Effective communicator able to translate technical risks into business impact.
• Calm and decisive under pressure, with strong incident leadership skills.

What Success Looks Like

• Platforms are stable, secure and scalable, enabling business growth without bottlenecks.
• IRP/DRP processes are well-practiced, with minimal business disruption during incidents.
• Well-documented, compliant infrastructure and platform standards.
• Technical issues flagged by business units are resolved efficiently, with clear escalation and accountability.
• Platform engineering teams operate with high ownership, delivering against SLAs and strategic goals.

What You'll Get

• Leadership over TIME Retail's technology backbone and the operational readiness that supports it.
• Authority to set standards for platform, infrastructure, DevSecOps and operational resilience.
• Support from senior leadership to invest in modernization, scalability and security.
• A collaborative, high-performance environment focused on long-term stability and operational excellence.