Associate Director Platform Engineering

Blend is seeking an Associate Director to lead the Platform Engineering workstream on a global product delivery. This is a senior client-facing leadership role. The individual will own the platform engineering workstream end-to-end act as the primary escalation point to the Delivery Leads make key technical decisions in partnership with the client and actively develop junior members of the platform team. 

Responsibilities

• Lead on project delivery and governance for the Platform Engineering workstream. 
• Support and develop Platform Engineers across the engagement providing technical direction and day-to-day guidance. 
• Build and maintain a scalable secure and reliable cloud platform on Microsoft Azure covering infrastructure networking identity and environment strategy. 
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and environment automation for engineering and data workloads. 
• Define and promote best practices for infrastructure as code security monitoring and observability across the team. 
• Act as the primary escalation point to Delivery Leads for platform risks blockers and issues bringing context and recommended options not just problems. 
• Operate as Blends senior technical for representative platform engineering in client-facing settings building trusted relationships with client engineering and architecture stakeholders. 
• Own key platform engineering decisions when working alongside the client translating technical trade-offs into clear business-relevant guidance. 
• Champion good engineering practices to minimise technical debt and ensure long-term platform reliability. 
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers setting clear standards for quality delivery behaviours and continuous improvement. 
• Contribute to Blends engineering strategy and capability development alongside delivery leadership.

Qualifications :

• Proven ability to lead platform engineering workstreams on large complex custom system development programmes with direct client accountability.
• Deep hands-on experience designing building and operating secure scalable cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. 
• Strong background in DevOps principles site reliability engineering or platform engineering in a consulting or professional services context. 
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code Terraform in particular including modular design remote state and CI/CD integration. 
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and automation using GitHub Actions Azure DevOps or equivalent tooling. 
• Strong understanding of networking security and identity management in cloud environments. 
• Hands-on experience with containerisation and orchestration Docker Kubernetes AKS. 
• Experience designing and managing decoupled microservice and event-driven architectures at scale. 
• Knowledge of monitoring logging and observability platforms
• Experience implementing cost optimisation scaling strategies and performance monitoring in production systems. 
• Demonstrable experience working directly with clients at a senior technical level including leading workshops design sessions and technical reviews. 
• Proven track record mentoring and developing platform and DevOps engineers across seniority levels.
• Microsoft Azure: Deep expertise across AKS App Services API Management networking Key Vault Managed Identities Azure Monitor and Storage. Experience designing multi-region enterprise-scale architectures. 
• Terraform / IaC: Advanced Terraform skills including modular design remote state management workspace strategies and CI/CD integration. Able to set team standards and conduct code reviews. 
• Microservices: Proven design and delivery of decoupled microservices at scale API gateway patterns event-driven architecture containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes) service mesh and observability. 
• DevSecOps & CI/CD: Secure delivery pipelines shift-left security practices policy-as-code (Azure Policy OPA) and automated testing within platform pipelines. 
• Cloud Governance: RBAC networking controls tagging standards cost management and compliance baselines across Azure environments. 
• Observability: Monitoring logging and alerting across platform and application layers  
• Security & Identity: Networking security Managed Identities Key Vault and cloud security best practices in a complex enterprise environment.

Additional Information :

• Hands-on experience with Databricks on Azure including Unity Catalog VNet injection cluster policies and integration with Azure storage and identity. 
• Experience with security and compliance frameworks (ISO 27001 SOC 2 GDPR). 
• Proven ability to build platform foundations for data and AI workloads. 
• In-depth experience with Azure DevOps and GitHub Advanced Security features. 
• Relevant certifications: Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert HashiCorp Terraform Associate or equivalent.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time