Head of Platform Engineering (Manchester Area)

Our Ideal Candidate

As Head of Platform Engineering at MaxContact, you’ll be a key member of our engineering leadership team, responsible for developing and empowering a cross-functional group of DevOps, SRE, DBA's.

We’re looking for a strong leader who thrives on building high-performing teams, delivering complex projects at pace, and proactively drives strategic initiatives that align with our ambitious growth goals. With deep experience in Azure and cloud-native architectures, you’ll shape our platform roadmap, improve reliability and scalability, and foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

If you’re passionate about leading through influence, enabling others to succeed, and making a lasting impact on both technology and culture, MaxContact could be your next big move.

Key Responsibilities

Operational Excellence

• Ensure high availability, performance, and resilience of the CCaaS platform through robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices across all Cloud-hosted services.

• Maintain a secure, compliant, and well-governed cloud environment by enforcing infrastructure standards, managing configurations as code, and proactively mitigating risks across all production environments.

• Maintain and improve FinOps best practices to monitor, optimise, and forecast Azure cloud spend—ensuring cost efficiency without compromising reliability, scalability, or performance.

Platform Strategy:

• Develop and execute a forward-looking platform engineering strategy aligned with MaxContact product roadmap and growth objectives.

• Champion the adoption of cloud-native technologies, automation, containerisation, infrastructure-as-code to drive scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency.

• Own and evolve platform engineering KPIs that track system health, delivery efficiency, and team performance.

Team Leadership:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a multidisciplinary team across DevOps, SRE, DBA, and Network Engineering, fostering a culture of ownership and continuous learning.

• Set clear goals, drive accountability, and support professional development through regular coaching and performance reviews to help the team achieve their potential.

• Promote collaboration across engineering teams, ensuring platform capabilities are tightly aligned with product development needs.

Project Delivery:

• Possess effective project management skills and own the successful delivery of key platform initiatives including CI/CD improvements, infrastructure upgrades, observability enhancements and technology swapouts.

• Manage capacity planning and prioritisation of team work, balancing short-term demands with long-term technical vision

• Have a commercial mindset and be adept at producing work estimates and operational costing quotes for sales enablement projects

Security & Compliance:

• Embed security best practices across all stages of the SDLC, ensuring adherence to secure-by-design and zero trust principles.

• Collaborate with security and compliance stakeholders to maintain ISO 9001, 27001, GDPR, and other relevant standards.

• Ensure infrastructure and DevOps processes meet audit, compliance, and data protection requirements without compromising agility.

Communication & Stakeholder Management:

• Act as a trusted advisor to product, engineering, and leadership stakeholders across the business, translating complex technical topics into clear, business-aligned insights.

• Communicate platform vision, progress, and risks effectively across technical and non-technical teams.

• Build strong relationships with cloud vendors, tooling partners, and third-party providers to ensure service quality and alignment with evolving needs.

Experience

Essential:

· Proven experience leading high-performing Platform Engineering, DevOps, or SRE teams, in a SaaS environment.

· Deep expertise in Microsoft Azure services, including Azure Functions, AKS, ADF, Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) and good open source knowledge e.g. PostgreSQL

· Strong people leadership and line management experience—able to coach, develop, and performance-manage cross-functional teams.

· Track record of designing, building, and operating scalable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud platforms.

· Hands-on experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and observability frameworks.

· Deep understanding of operational excellence practices, including system reliability, incident management, and SRE methodologies.

· Demonstrated ability to embed security and compliance practices across the SDLC (e.g., DevSecOps, Zero Trust).

· Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, capable of aligning technical initiatives with business outcomes.

Desirable:

· Experience in the Contact Centre, Telephony, or VoIP domain, particularly within CCaaS or real-time communications platforms.

· Familiarity with networking principles, SIP, SBCs, and telephony infrastructure in cloud environments.

· Exposure to FinOps practices and tools for managing cloud cost efficiency and forecasting.

· Experience working closely with Product and Engineering leadership to shape platform roadmaps and internal developer tools.

· Azure certifications (e.g., Azure Solutions Architect Expert, DevOps Engineer Expert) or equivalent SRE/DevSecOps accreditations.

· Experience managing vendor relationships and third-party cloud tooling integrations.