Arbor Education on cord

Arbor Education

Director of Platform Operations

External position
Remote in UK
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EdTech · Cloud and Infrastructure
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Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
2 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Head of Infrastructure
Experience level: Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Agile, AWS, CloudFormation
Other skills considered: Terraform, Security and Compliance, Technical Direction

Logistics

Base salary: £150K - £160K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Remote
Work from: Within United Kingdom
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced and highly knowledgeable Platform Operations Director to join our Engineering team and to own the operational backbone of Arbor's suite of applications. The remit and focus of the role is to bring together three distinct disciplines - Site Reliability Engineering, Security Engineering, and Developer Experience - under single accountable leadership, and be responsible for their outcomes across every product line and market. It's a broad and exciting role, so we're looking for someone up for a challenge - if you're an effective leader and are highly collaborative, this is the role for you.


Core responsibilities

Site Reliability Engineering and availability

  • Own the availability commitment. Be accountable for meeting the 99.9% availability SLA across the application suite. Define, publish, and govern the SLO and error-budget framework that makes availability measurable, forecastable, and actionable rather than retrospective.
  • Build the reliability discipline. Lead the SRE pillar to embed observability, capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and toil reduction as standing practices with clear owners and cadence.
  • Make reliability visible. Ensure availability, latency, and error-budget consumption are reported transparently to product teams, R&D leadership, and the executive, with credible attribution of loss to cause.
  • Engineer out recurrence. Drive systemic reliability improvement through problem management, tracking repeat causes, single points of failure, and architectural weak points to closure with named owners and dates.

Security engineering and vulnerability management

  • Own the vulnerability management framework. Define and operate the end-to-end framework for identifying, triaging, prioritising, and remediating security vulnerabilities across application code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure, including agreed severity definitions and remediation SLAs.
  • Put the reporting in place. Build the reporting and dashboards that allow the organisation - R&D leadership, the executive, and where relevant the board and customers - to monitor vulnerability burn-down and resolution against SLA, by severity, age, and owning team.
  • Hold the line on remediation. Ensure vulnerabilities are resolved rather than merely recorded: drive burn-down of the existing backlog, prevent ageing, and escalate credibly where remediation is not being prioritised.
  • Shift security left. Embed security into the engineering workflow through automated scanning, secure-by-default platform patterns, dependency hygiene, and practical enablement for product teams. Partner closely with security leadership and the CISO on posture, roadmap, compliance obligations, and audit evidence.

Developer Experience and the build-it, run-it transformation

  • Lead the transformation. Own the programme of work that moves product engineering teams to "build it, run it" - taking genuine production ownership of their services, including on-call, alerting, and operational health - via a staged, evidenced adoption path rather than a mandate.
  • Make the right thing the easy thing. Lead the DevX pillar to deliver the internal developer platform, golden paths, self-service tooling, CI/CD, and environment provisioning that make ownership viable for teams and reduce cognitive load.
  • Treat platform as a product. Run the platform with product discipline: known internal customers, articulated service levels, adoption metrics, feedback loops, and a roadmap prioritised on developer impact.
  • Measure and improve engineering throughput. Own the engineering productivity metrics - deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and time to restore - and use them to target investment where it demonstrably lifts delivery.

Requirements

  • Proven senior leadership of SRE, platform, or infrastructure functions at scale, with accountability for availability against a defined SLA in a customer-facing SaaS environment.
  • Deep, practical command of reliability engineering: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, observability, capacity planning, and problem management.
  • Demonstrated ownership of a major incident management process, including incident command models, on-call design, and blameless post-incident review, with evidence of materially improving MTTR.
  • Track record of owning or closely partnering on security posture, including vulnerability management at scale, remediation SLAs, and reporting to executive or board level.
  • Experience leading a shift to distributed production ownership (build it, run it) in an organisation that previously centralised operations.
  • Experience of internal developer platform or platform-as-a-product models, and of using engineering productivity metrics to drive investment.
  • Credible judgement on where and how to apply AI to operational workflows, with a clear-eyed view of what to automate, what to augment, and where human accountability must remain.
  • Strong track record of building and developing engineering leaders, including handling performance robustly.
  • Ability to deliver outcomes through influence across teams outside direct reporting lines, and to hold peers to account constructively.
  • Strong technical credibility across modern cloud platforms (AWS) and infrastructure as code (Terraform), with the judgement to hold teams to a high engineering standard.
  • Excellent communication and influencing skills, able to operate confidently at executive level and convey technical and risk concepts to non-technical audiences, including during live incidents.

Desirable

  • Experience in enterprise SaaS at scale, ideally in EdTech or another data-sensitive or regulated domain.
  • Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks relevant to education data, for example ISO 27001, SOC 2, Cyber Essentials Plus, and UK GDPR obligations.
  • Hands-on experience of AIOps or AI-assisted incident tooling, and of evaluating such tooling responsibly.
  • Experience running a multi-product, multi-market estate on shared platform foundations.
  • Familiarity with PHP-based estates, Docker and containerisation, and Kanban and agile delivery.
  • FinOps experience and accountability for cloud cost efficiency.

Company Benefits

  • We believe in supporting you to grow professionally and giving you the freedom to choose how. If you tell us where you want to go, we have a dedicated training budget to help you get there!
  • One of our core values is to make an impact, so we give everyone 1 day off each year to volunteer with a charity of your choice.
  • We promote positive well being and as part of this you’ll have access to a choice of comprehensive 24/7 well being support services as well as internal Wellbeing Champions.
  • We support autonomy and flexibility, and depending on your role can offer flexible working.
  • We offer enhanced maternity pay to support new mothers during this exciting period of your life.
  • Spending quality time together is really important, so to encourage this, our social committees organise regular team nights out (we’ve had pizza making and curry clubs!)
  • We offer 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays), part of which is made up of half day Fridays during the school summer holidays, a day off during Easter and a day off over Christmas.
  • Private dental insurance through BUPA dental
  • Financial wellbeing support via Bippit
  • Free access to the Calm wellbeing app
  • Our offices are based in the heart of Leeds, London, Lincoln and Belgrade. It’s lively and vibrant, and you’ll have breakfast supplied every day along with other healthy snacks you can choose from.
Director of Platform Operations at Arbor Education
Position posted 2 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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