The Director of Engineering - DTC Platform Engineering leads the organisation responsible for the shared engineering platforms, cloud foundations, integration capabilities, quality and performance engineering services, and developer tooling that enable DTC product teams to build and deliver secure, scalable and reliable software. This is a foundational leadership role: every product team, every consumer-facing capability, and every commerce transaction depends on the platforms, pipelines, and practices this organisation owns and operates.
You will lead a cross-functional organisation spanning DevOps & CI/CD, Application Security, Test Automation, Enterprise Integrations, Performance Engineering, and Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure. You will work with the SRE & Operations team to define observability standards, SLO enablement, resilience requirements and production-readiness controls. Your remit is to ensure our engineering platform accelerates product delivery velocity without sacrificing quality or resilience - and that our cloud infrastructure is secure, cost-efficient, and built to scale. This role is a key engineering partner to all three product engineering organisations: Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, and Core Commerce Platform.
Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership:
- DevOps & CI/CD - build, test, and deployment pipelines, developer tooling, GitOps workflows and release engineering.
- Performance Engineering - load testing, performance profiling, capacity planning, and Core Web Vitals governance.
- Quality Engineering & Test Automation - Enterprise quality strategy, automated testing frameworks, release quality governance, test platforms, and engineering quality standards.
- Integration Architecture & Platform Services - API management, integration architecture, event-driven platforms, shared services, and platform governance.
- Cloud Architecture - infrastructure design, cloud provisioning, Kubernetes platform, networking, security, and cost optimisation.
- Security & Compliance Engineering - Infrastructure security, secrets management, vulnerability management, data protection and security assurance.
Platform Vision & Engineering Strategy
- Define and execute the multi-year Platform Engineering strategy by establishing the technology vision for cloud infrastructure, developer experience, quality engineering, enterprise integrations and automation across the DTC estate.
- Build a platform that acts as a strategic enabler for product engineering teams: reducing toil, accelerating delivery cycles, and raising the quality and reliability bar across all consumer-facing systems.
- Own the platform engineering roadmap and promote adoption of platform capabilities.
- Drive the adoption of platform engineering as a product discipline - treating internal engineering teams as customers and building self-service infrastructure and tooling accordingly.
DevOps & CI/CD
- Increase adoption of CI/CD capabilities across all product engineering organisations - enabling fast, safe, and automated delivery from code commit to production.
- Govern branching strategies, environment topology (dev, staging, UAT, prod), and deployment runbooks across all product teams.
- GitOps-based deployment workflows, progressive delivery patterns (canary releases, blue-green deployments, feature flags), and trunk-based development practices.
- Drive developer experience (DevEx) improvements - fast build times, reliable pipelines, self-service environment provisioning, and clear developer documentation.
- Establish release governance processes that balance deployment speed with change risk management, particularly for high-impact commerce events such as sale periods and product launches.
Quality Engineering & Test Automation
- Define and execute Quality Engineering strategy across all DTC platforms, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Define and evolve shared test automation frameworks covering functional, regression, API, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Establish quality standards, metrics, and governance to improve release confidence and reduce production defects.
- Enable engineering teams through reusable testing capabilities, tooling, and quality engineering best practices.
Performance Engineering
- Define and execute the Performance Engineering strategy, ensuring applications and platforms meet scalability, reliability, and user experience objectives.
- Establish performance standards, capacity planning practices, and non-functional requirements across all product domains.
- Lead performance optimization initiatives across applications, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and consumer experiences.
- Govern performance KPIs, Core Web Vitals, and platform readiness for major business events and traffic peaks.
Security & Compliance Engineering
- Own the security engineering strategy across cloud infrastructure, platform services, and software delivery pipelines.
- Drive DevSecOps adoption through automated security controls, vulnerability management, and policy enforcement.
- Implement and govern platform controls for identity, secrets management, cloud security posture and compliance automation in collaboration with the central infrastructure team.
- Partner with enterprise security teams to ensure adherence to security compliance requirements.
- Foster a culture of secure-by-design engineering across all product and platform teams.
Integration Architecture & Engineering
- Own the integration platform vision & strategy, capability roadmap, priorities & adoption across the DTC ecosystem.
- Lead adoption of API-first and event-driven platform capabilities that accelerate delivery and reduce integration complexity.
- Establish reusable integration frameworks, shared services, and platform governance to drive consistency and operational excellence.
- Partner with Product Engineering, Data, and Architecture teams to ensure integration capabilities support current and future business needs.
AI Engineering Platforms & Automation
- Define and evolve the strategy for AI-enabled engineering platforms, capabilities and practices across the DTC engineering organisation.
- Establish reusable platform capabilities, standards and guardrails that enable teams to safely adopt AI technologies and accelerate delivery.
- Drive the adoption of AI-assisted and automated engineering practices across the software development lifecycle, improving developer productivity, quality and operational efficiency.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies, platform capabilities and engineering practices, translating them into scalable and practical solutions that create business and engineering value.
- Ensure AI-enabled capabilities are implemented with appropriate controls for security, compliance, observability, cost management and responsible use.
Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership
- Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-disciplinary team of DevOps engineers, QA automation engineers, performance engineers, cloud architects, security engineers.
- Operate as a trusted platform partner to the Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, and Core Commerce Platform engineering directors - understanding their needs and proactively improving the platform beneath them.
- Build strong relationships with Security, Finance (FinOps), and Infrastructure procurement stakeholders.
- Represent platform engineering in architecture review boards, incident reviews, and engineering leadership forums.
