Platform Engineering Manager

Company Description

It is our vision to connect the insurance community through market-leading technology. Our people are placed at the heart of this, and diversity, equity and inclusion are central to everything we do.

We know the key to achieving success is to enable a positive, inclusive, and collaborative working culture, and, as part of our commitment, we have signed up for a number of pledges and programmes designed to support and nurture our people.

No matter where you sit or which team you are a part of, we want you to know that you contribute in helping us to shape where the company will be in the future. We would love for each employee to be able to talk with pride about our company and, most importantly, consider Open GI to be an inclusive, fun and fulfilling place to work.

Position

This is a senior, dual-mode leadership role for someone who can operate equally well as a technical practitioner and a people-focused engineering manager. The Cloud Platform Engineering Manager owns the vision, delivery, and operation of internal cloud platform services — treating those services as a product with internal development teams as customers. They'll remain hands-on technically (architecture, IaC, code, incidents) while also leading a team, managing stakeholder relationships across engineering, security, and architecture, and driving the cultural shift toward platform thinking. The role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and operations, with a strong emphasis on reducing cognitive load for delivery teams, raising the engineering bar, and building a healthy, high-trust team.

Your key responsibilities

Platform-as-a-Product leadership

• Own the platform vision, value proposition, and roadmap for cloud platform services, grounded in internal customer needs and measurable outcomes.
• Treat stream-aligned teams as customers, maintaining strong feedback loops and iterating the platform based on real usage and pain points.
• Evangelise platform thinking across the organisation: the platform should be chosen, not mandated.

Hands-on engineering leadership

Act as a senior engineer within the platform team, contributing directly to:

• Architecture and design decisions
• Code, IaC, and platform automation
• Technical reviews and quality standards
• Incident response and post-incident learning

• Set the technical bar for production-grade engineering, security, and operability across platform services.
• Lead by example in applying engineering discipline: testing, automation, observability, documentation, and continuous improvement.

Cloud platform services & paved roads

• Build and evolve a portfolio of cloud platform services (e.g. landing zones, CI/CD enablement, IaC patterns, identity and access guardrails, runtime patterns, observability, vulnerability scanning, backup and DR)
• Ensure services are self-service, discoverable, and opinionated, making the secure and reliable path the easiest path.
• Reduce cognitive load by curating complexity, not pushing it onto delivery teams.

Operational excellence & platform health

Own the production operation of platform services:

• Clear service ownership
• SLOs / SLAs and error budgets
• On-call and incident management
• Post-incident reviews and learning loops

• Build strong observability for platform services and connect technical signals to customer and product impact where possible.
• Drive improvements in reliability, security, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation, including the use of Azure Well-Architected reviews.
• Prefer mechanisms over manual process: policy-as-code, automation, guardrails, and continuous controls that scale with adoption.

Governance, risk, and enablement

• Establish safe boundaries for teams building and running in Azure, balancing autonomy with compliance and risk management
• Work with security, architecture, and delivery teams to ensure platform services actively reduce risk, rather than shifting it
• Support delivery teams during security incidents and resilience events, improving the platform based on real failures

People leadership & team health

• Line manage and grow the platform engineering team: coaching, mentoring, performance management, and career development.
• Create a safe, high-trust environment where engineers can learn, experiment, and improve.
• Build a strong sense of shared ownership for platform outcomes, quality, and reliability.

Requirements

What you'll need to succeed:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience of cloud engineering and building infrastructure-as-code in Azure.
• Experience of managing a team of 5-6 senior engineers.
• Proven experience of owning production services, including incident management, SLOs, and reliability improvements.
• Collaborative approach to platform adoption or a bias toward self-service over gatekeeping.
• Focus on outcomes: values impact over activity.
• Ownership mindset: accountable for results, trade-offs, and follow-through.
• Continuous improvement mindset: curious, reflective, and always raising the bar.
• Emotional intelligence as a leader to build trust, clarity, and psychological safety.

Other information

Mission and Values

It is our mission to be both the Technology Partner and Employer of Choice to the UK General Insurance market. Our people are placed at the heart of this and diversity, equality and inclusion are central to everything we do.

• Accountability: We own our actions and shape our success on the results we deliver
• Innovation: We tackle challenges with fresh thinking and bold ideas
• Teamwork: We work together, recognising we can’t do this without each other
• Trust: We build trust on integrity, transparency and mutual respect

We are looking for an individual who embraces our values in their actions, decisions, communications and processes to inspire positivity and, ultimately, exceptional performance.

Benefits package

• Salary in the region of £70,000, dependant on skills and experience
• Company pension
• Bonus opportunity
• Life assurance and critical illness cover
• Cycle to work scheme
• Perkbox – an exclusive platform offering a wide range of discounts and benefits
• Holiday entitlement of 25 days per annum, increasing to 26 days per annum after three years of service & a holiday purchase scheme
• Opportunity for a more flexible approach to start, finish, and lunchtimes to allow you to better manage events outside of work
• Social clubs - whether you’re into your cycling, crafts, or other hobbies, we have a number of groups at Open GI where individuals who enjoy the same pursuits can get together
• Wellbeing – wills at work scheme, employee assistance programme and mental health first aiders

Please note, this is a hybrid position requiring in-office attendance at our Worcester or Winchester location twice a week.