Platform Development Lead

Purpose This role is designed to bring dedicated technical leadership to our platform team while also owning production reliability and quality. Leading a cross-functional platform team, including DevOps specialists, senior data developers/architects, and QA automation, while simultaneously owning the end-to-end production health of our SaaS product. You will be the bridge between engineering, product, and customer success, driving systematic strategies to reduce bugs, improve reliability, and elevate the overall quality of our platform. Accountabilities & Expected Outcomes Platform Team Leadership & People Management Lead, mentor, and grow a cross-functional platform team of DevOps specialists, Power BI/data platform architects, and a QA automation engineer. Set clear goals, conduct regular 1:1s, and support the professional development of each team member. Foster a collaborative, high-trust team culture aligned with Team Topologies principles — acting as an enabling team that reduces cognitive load on stream-aligned teams. Manage team capacity, prioritization, and delivery of platform initiatives. Hire and onboard new platform team members as the organization scales. Production Reliability & Bug Management Own the end-to-end production monitoring strategy, including tooling, alerting, and observability frameworks. Lead bug triage processes, assess severity, coordinate investigation, assign ownership across stream-aligned teams, and track resolution. Drive root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring issues and translate findings into systemic improvement strategies. Define and track reliability metrics (e.g. MTTR, bug escape rate, defect density) and report on trends to engineering and product leadership. Build and continuously improve processes for bug intake, prioritization, and communication to internal stakeholders. Stakeholder Communication & Cross-Team Coordination Act as the primary technology point of contact for production issues, communicating clearly and proactively with Product and Customer Success teams. Provide regular status updates on open bugs, reliability trends, and resolution timelines. Coordinate with stream-aligned teams to ensure production issues are addressed efficiently without disrupting their delivery flow. Translate technical complexity into clear, business-relevant language for non-technical stakeholders. Platform Engineering & Enablement Oversee the design, development, operation, and documentation of shared engineering infrastructure including CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring tools, and the internal Power BI data platform. Ensure the platform team delivers high-quality, self-service capabilities that reduce friction for product engineering teams. Champion engineering standards: security baselines, observability practices, testing frameworks, and deployment best practices. Identify and evaluate build-vs-buy decisions for platform tooling; manage relevant vendor relationships. Collaborate with stream-aligned teams to understand their needs and shape the platform roadmap accordingly. Quality Engineering Strategy Leverage the QA automation engineer to build scalable test frameworks that integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Drive a shift-left quality mindset across engineering teams, embedding quality practices earlier in the development lifecycle. Use production data and bug patterns to inform test coverage improvements and preventive quality strategies. Leadership and People Sharing and cascading the IMDEX vision, strategy and objectives to own team. Team members understand the IMDEX vision and team objectives with clear role clarity. Ensuring staff are engaged and competent to perform their tasks and compliant with all group policies, procedures and regional regulations. Raising difficult issues to ensure that they are addressed and leading team members to follow through on difficult actions or initiatives. Willingly passes on skills, sharing job knowledge and training others. Assigning appropriate support and resources to personnel to maximize success. Setting and providing clear direction and expectations. Effectively delegating and removing obstacles to get work done. Setting stretch goals and opportunities to drive higher performance. Team employee engagement levels increase annually through investment in people. Recruiting talent based on capability requirements. Performance and Development Reviews (Achievement and Development Reviews ADRs) on direct reports completed, ensuring cascade to full region. Poor performance issues addressed in a timely manner. Supporting team members to create and action development objectives. Learning from setbacks, keeping calm under pressure and is sensitive to the needs of others during a time of crisis. Health, Safety and Environment Utilizing resources to establish, implement, maintain, and improve the Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE) management system. Ensuring risk management activities are conducted within area of responsibility, including the identification and implementation of any site-specific measures required to eliminate or reduce risk in their area. Ensuring employees are provided with the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE), instruction, information, training, and supervision to enable work to be carried out safely. In consultation with the QHSE Representative, developing and implementing an injury management program for injured employees. Completion of hazard and aspect identification and elimination/reduction programmes for team. Effective incident reporting. Regular workplace inspections conducted. Safety meetings conducted. Site activities comply with workplace health, safety, and environmental legislation and the IMDEX QHSE management system. Employees and QHSE Representatives are consulted with regarding any QHSE issues and performance. Quality alert system is utilized to initiate and respond to QHSE issues. Risk and Compliance Leading the collaborative identification of risks and compliance requirements relevant to the team. Promoting the reporting of potential non-compliance or misconduct through appropriate channels. Leading by example to promote positive risk and compliance behaviors to the team and to colleagues. Ensuring the compliance of team members with IMDEX risk and compliance policies, local laws and other relevant standards. Applicable risk management and regulatory compliance processes are implemented by the team. Behaviors that do not align with the IMDEX Code of Conduct are challenged. Qualifications, Skills & Experience Bachelor’s Degree (Computer Science, Technology, Engineering, or related field) 5+ years of experience in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or a related technical discipline such as software development or technical QA. 5+ years in a people management or technical lead role, with demonstrated success in growing engineering talent. Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and monitoring/observability tooling. Proven track record of owning production reliability, driving incident response, and implementing systematic quality improvements. Strong communication skills, able to engage effectively with both engineers and non-technical business stakeholders. Familiarity with agile delivery practices and experience working within product engineering organizations. Experience in a SaaS product company with production quality responsibilities. Demonstrated ability to manage multiple competing priorities and translate strategy into actionable plans. Desirable Product reliability Quality Assurance Verbal and written communication Mentoring Leadership Strategic thinking Conflict Resolution Goal setting Analytical Team Building Critical thinking Adaptability Time management Project Management Problem Solving Technical Proficiency Empathy