Director of Platform Operations

Arbor Education

. Own Arbor’s operational backbone across its suite of applications .

Posted 9/17/2026full-timeRemote • United KingdomLead💰 £150,000 - £160,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in Site Reliability Engineering, Security Engineering, and Developer Experience, with a strong focus on operational excellence, availability commitments, and vulnerability management. Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams, drive systemic reliability improvements, and effectively communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Site Reliability Engineering LeadershipSLA Accountability in SaaSObservability and Capacity PlanningVulnerability Management at ScaleEngineering Productivity Metrics

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

SLIsSLOsError BudgetsIncident ManagementMTTR ImprovementAWSTerraformAIOpsPHPDocker

Soft Skills

Excellent CommunicationInfluencing SkillsTeam Leadership

Tools & Technologies

CI/CDInternal Developer PlatformsAgile DeliveryKanban

Certifications & Qualifications

ISO 27001SOC 2Cyber Essentials PlusUK GDPR

Industry Keywords

Enterprise SaaSEdTechData-Sensitive DomainsRegulated DomainsFinOps

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDockerPHPTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own Arbor’s operational backbone across its suite of applications
Bring Site Reliability Engineering, Security Engineering, and Developer Experience under single accountable leadership
Own availability commitments and be accountable for the 99.9% availability SLA
Define, publish, and govern SLO and error-budget frameworks
Lead observability, capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and toil reduction
Report availability, latency, and error-budget consumption to product teams, R&D leadership, executives, and relevant boards or customers
Drive systemic reliability improvements and resolve recurring causes, single points of failure, and architectural weaknesses
Define and operate vulnerability management across application code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure
Build vulnerability reporting and dashboards and drive remediation backlog burn-down against SLAs
Embed security into engineering workflows through automated scanning, secure-by-default platform patterns, dependency hygiene, and team enablement
Partner with security leadership and the CISO on security posture, roadmap, compliance obligations, and audit evidence
Lead the move to “build it, run it,” giving product engineering teams production ownership including on-call, alerting, and operational health
Lead delivery of the internal developer platform, golden paths, self-service tooling, CI/CD, and environment provisioning
Run the platform as a product with internal customers, service levels, adoption metrics, feedback loops, and an impact-focused roadmap
Own engineering productivity metrics including deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and time to restore

Requirements

What you’ll need

Proven senior leadership of SRE, platform, or infrastructure functions at scale
Accountability for availability against a defined SLA in a customer-facing SaaS environment
Deep practical command of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, observability, capacity planning, and problem management
Experience owning a major incident management process, including incident command models, on-call design, and blameless post-incident reviews
Evidence of materially improving MTTR
Experience owning or closely partnering on security posture, vulnerability management at scale, remediation SLAs, and executive or board-level reporting
Experience leading a shift to distributed production ownership (“build it, run it”)
Experience with internal developer platforms or platform-as-a-product models
Experience using engineering productivity metrics to drive investment
Judgement on applying AI to operational workflows
Strong track record building and developing engineering leaders, including handling performance robustly
Ability to deliver outcomes through influence across teams outside direct reporting lines
Strong technical credibility with AWS and Terraform
Excellent communication and influencing skills, including conveying technical and risk concepts to non-technical audiences during live incidents
Desirable: enterprise SaaS at scale, ideally EdTech or another data-sensitive or regulated domain
Desirable: familiarity with ISO 27001, SOC 2, Cyber Essentials Plus, and UK GDPR obligations
Desirable: hands-on AIOps or AI-assisted incident tooling experience
Desirable: multi-product, multi-market estates on shared platform foundations
Desirable: PHP-based estates, Docker, containerisation, Kanban, and agile delivery
Desirable: FinOps and cloud cost efficiency accountability
Must be able to work without visa sponsorship, as visa sponsorship is unavailable

Benefits

Comp & perks

Dedicated wellbeing team and initiatives including mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, and mental health first aid training
32 days holiday plus Bank Holidays (25 days annual leave plus 7 company-wide days)
Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
Comprehensive wellness benefit through AIG Smart Health, including 24/7 virtual GP, mental health support, counselling, and personalised health checks
Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
Salary sacrifice pension provided by Scottish Widows
Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay)
Enhanced paternity leave (6 weeks full pay)
5 free return-to-work maternity coaching sessions
Access to Calm and Bippit financial wellbeing coaching
Flexible working
Social committees and team, office, and company-wide events
Dedicated professional development training budget, including CPD courses, upskilling resources, and professional memberships
One paid volunteer day each year
Dog-friendly offices
Referral voucher valued up to £200