Platform Technical Lead (OpenShift) – Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Overview

As Platform Technical Lead you own the platform’s design, build, operation and evolution, ensuring production-grade integrity. You partner with the Platform Product Lead to translate strategy into robust engineering outcomes and defend technical decisions with data. You drive the platform roadmap, enforce standards, and streamline developer experience for product teams. You lead automation to remove toil and ensure scalable, observable, and reliable platform services. This is a chance to shape a high-impact platform at scale within a customer-focused, product-led environment.

Pay / Benefits

• Annual bonus up to 45%
• Car cash allowance
• Holiday 25 days + personal day + bank holidays
• Private medical insurance
• Retirement savings plan with Tesco contribution
• Maternity/adoption leave and paternity leave

Responsibilities

• Act as design authority for the platform, managing the technical roadmap and Architecture Decision Records; run design reviews and uphold standards.
• Own the target architecture across the full stack (OpenShift, GitOps with Argo CD, multi-cluster policy, observability, networking, storage, IaC).
• Define paved-road patterns and evaluate new tech against product outcomes with structured spikes and documented rationale.
• Treat the platform as a product: manage API/interface contracts, versioning, deprecation, capacity guarantees, and consumer-focused documentation.
• Measure and improve the consumer experience (integration lead time, breaking-change incidents, ticket deflection).
• Design decisions to optimize end-to-end developer experience and platform usability for product teams.
• Co-develop platform product roadmap with Platform Lead; define how to implement, sequence and manage technical risk.
• Eliminate toil by automating repetitive production tasks; backlog manual production paths as defects.
• Develop and maintain DevOps practices; ensure the team owns and supports what they build.
• Maintain production ownership with SLOs, error budgets, capacity, performance; lead incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Ensure delivered work is production-grade: well-documented, tested, observable, and handoff-ready.
• Represent the platform in cross-team forums; translate strategy into deliverable designs and defend positions with evidence.

Key requirements

• Proven technical leadership of a platform or product engineering team.
• Design authority experience with ADRs or equivalent, design reviews and enforcing standards.
• Platform mindset: treat the platform as a product with customer-centric design and deliberate API/versioning.
• Structured problem-solving for complex troubleshooting and incident response.
• Clear, evidence-based communication to engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to translate business strategy into a credible technical roadmap with sequencing and risk.
• Coaching capabilities to develop engineers and build succession.
• Product-first, agile delivery mindset with focus on outcomes and risk transparency.
• Systematic toil elimination and automation across production paths.

• Strong communication and stakeholder management
• Coaching and mentorship
• Analytical and structured thinking
• OpenShift design, build and operation at scale (OpenShift Virtualization/KubeVirt) across regions
• Kubernetes internals (scheduling, RBAC, CNI, CSI, etcd, API server)
• Hosted control planes (HyperShift/HCP)

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