Platform Lead

Blue Light Card. Individually great, together unstoppable The Role and the Team We’re looking for a Platform Lead to join our Engineering team at Blue Light Card at a pivotal moment. This is a foundational role, with the platform function just getting started and a real opportunity to shape its direction, culture, and impact from the ground up. As Platform Lead, you’ll own platform engineering end to end, setting the strategy, building the team, and ensuring product squads have the tooling, infrastructure, and paved roads they need to deliver with confidence. You’ll define what “production ready” means across the organisation and work closely with Staff Engineers and Engineering Managers to make the right technical choices the easiest ones to make. This is a hands‑on leadership role that balances deep technical involvement with organisational impact. You’ll stay close to the technology and the challenges teams face, while owning the platform roadmap, influencing technical direction, and building a platform team that product squads trust and rely on. What you’ll do Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team, creating an environment where engineers and squads can thrive Own the platform roadmap, ensuring it delivers clear value to product teams and supports business growth Act as the trusted technical authority for platform and infrastructure decisions across engineering Set clear, practical production readiness standards covering reliability, observability, security, scalability, and cost Build and evolve paved‑road platform solutions, reference architectures, and reusable tooling Embed strong operational practices, including SLOs, alerting, and effective incident management Use operational data and insights to continuously improve platform reliability, performance, and efficiency Enable product teams to be increasingly self-sufficient through great documentation, collaboration, and thoughtful use of automation and AI What you’ll bring Proven experience leading a Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE function in a product led engineering organisation Deep, hands-on AWS expertise across compute, networking, storage, serverless, and security Strong Terraform experience, building reusable infrastructure‑as‑code that teams actively adopt Experience defining and operating SLOs, observability standards, and incident management at scale Ability to set technical direction and communicate it clearly to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders A strong people focus, with a track record of mentoring engineers and building high performing teams Experience with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and logging platforms, and modern platform engineering practices A commercial mindset, connecting platform investment to delivery speed, cost efficiency, and positive business outcomes Our Culture Our members, partners and colleagues are at the heart of everything we do. Our colleagues are integral to helping create the unique experience we deliver, so we're genuinely committed to creating a place where our team love to work, and people want to join. We work as a team and try to have a bit of fun while we do it, and we recognise the importance of culture and the positive impact it can have on performance for you, the team, our organisation and our members. We believe in attracting the best talent no matter where you are, and have a hybrid working model, with colleagues based in London, the East Midlands and around the country. We're also officially recognised as a Top 100 Great Place To Work UK, one of the UK's Best Workplaces for Wellbeing, Top 100 Best Workplaces for Women and recognised as investors in wellbeing by Investors in People. What We Offer Hybrid working 25 days plus public holidays, buy and sell and an additional day off for your birthday A company bonus scheme Great social events e.g., Christmas party, family fun day, summer party, sports matches Learning and development opportunities Group auto-enrolment pension plan Enhanced maternity,