Head of Platform & Cloud Engineering

Team: Platform & Cloud Engineering Manages: SRE team Location: Ireland (Dublin) - Hybrid : 3 days per week in the Dublin office About RapidRatings RapidRatings is a financial technology company on a mission to make the global economy more transparent and resilient. We provide quantitative financial health intelligence that helps enterprises understand the true condition of their suppliers and business partners, enabling smarter risk decisions across complex, global supply chains. Role Overview We are hiring a deeply technical senior leader to own the cloud platform, resilience, security posture, and AI infrastructure powering RapidRatings' products. The role blends deep systems engineering with modern SRE practice, bridging low-level cloud architecture, high-scale distributed systems, and platform engineering. As AI and developer self-service absorb routine pipeline toil, you will raise the technical bar for operational excellence, lead our SRE team, and build the paved-road infrastructure our AI systems, agents, and product squads run on. What You'll Own AWS architecture & distributed systems. Architect high-availability, multi-region AWS infrastructure optimised for scale, latency, resilience, and structural reliability. Reliability & operational excellence. Lead the SRE function to establish robust telemetry, SLO frameworks, and rigorous root-cause analysis through blameless post-incident reviews. Drive self-healing automation that minimises operational overhead and mean-time-to-recovery. AI infrastructure. Build and operate the model-serving layer, routing pipelines, cost attribution, and governance frameworks for our AI agents, copilots, and Platform Model Context Protocols (MCPs). Security & compliance posture. Own the platform's threat detection and defence. Embed SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls directly into infrastructure code and automated guardrails. Paved-road platform & FinOps. Design self-service infrastructure patterns so engineering squads ship securely and without friction, while continuously driving cloud cost optimisation. What This Role Is Not This is not pipeline maintenance. Product developers own their own build, test, and deployment workflows, using AI tooling on top of the paved road you provide. You build the foundational platform and guardrails, not application-level scripts. We're hiring for the leverage, not the toil. Qualifications & Technical Bar Kubernetes at the core. Deep, hands-on experience running production Kubernetes (EKS) at scale — this is the backbone of our platform, not an add-on. AWS mastery. Deep, hands-on experience across the native AWS stack (EKS/ECS, IAM, VPC networking, CloudFront, Lambda, RDS/DynamoDB) and infrastructure as code (Terraform / OpenTofu). Systems engineering. Strong foundation in Linux internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, routing), performance tuning, and operating distributed systems at scale. Security & compliance. Direct experience implementing and maintaining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 technical controls within cloud-native environments. Software development. Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for building platform tooling, custom telemetry, and automated remediation. AI/LLM operations. Hands-on exposure to model-hosting patterns, vector databases, API gateways, and LLM orchestration infrastructure. Leadership & mentorship. Track record of managing distributed SRE/infrastructure teams, including international squads, while remaining directly involved in architectural design. Who You Are A natural problem solver who stays curious, works logically, and digs past symptoms to root cause. You treat AI as a strong collaborator, building the platforms and guardrails that lift the whole engineering group rather than only your own output. You set technical direction and carry others with you through standards, design review, documentation, and mentoring. You communicate clearly across every tier, from technical specialists to the executive group, with meticulous attention to detail. You bring a calm, positive attitude under pressure, including during production incidents and against tight deadlines. Role Shape Balance: roughly 50% technical architecture and systems design, 50% team management, SRE strategy, and mentorship. Deeply technical, still in the architecture. Scope: direct manager for the SRE team; the authoritative technical leader setting cloud and platform standards across all engineering squads. Our Values Integrity, Innovation, Accountability, Resilience, Community. Some of our Benefits: Health insurance via RapidRatings with a generous allowance. Workplace pension with matched contributions up to 5%. 25 days of paid time off (PTO) Pay Transparency Statement (Ireland) In line with the EU Pay Transparency Directive, we are committed to openness about compensation. Salary Range: €125,000 to €150,000 base salary (Dublin, Ireland) The salary offered to the successful candidate is determined by objective criteria including relevant experience and skills, level of responsibility, demands of the role, and business need. As part of the total compensation package, this role may also be eligible for performance bonus and other benefits.