Director of Platform Engineering

dunnhumby is the global leader in Customer Data Science, empowering businesses everywhere to compete and thrive in the modern data-driven economy. We always put the Customer First.
Our mission: to enable businesses to grow and reimagine themselves by becoming advocates and champions for their Customers. With deep heritage and expertise in retail – one of the world\’s most competitive markets, with a deluge of multi-dimensional data – dunnhumby today enables businesses all over the world, across industries, to be Customer First.
dunnhumby employs nearly 2,500 experts in offices throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas working for transformative, iconic brands such as Tesco, Coca-Cola, Meijer, Procter & Gamble and Metro.
We\’re looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to spearhead dunnhumby\’s transition to a platform centric approach and lead our efforts in building a world-class platform engineering enablement ecosystem. This role will focus on creating a platform that empowers products, fosters innovation, and delivers exceptional user interactions delivering robust internal developer platform (IDP) capabilities, strengthening CI/CD pipelines, enabling on-demand environments, and scaling platform foundations such as observability, security, and FinOps – while adhering to best practices in DevOps and modern software delivery
What we expect from you

• Drive the development of a comprehensive IDP (e.g., based on Backstage ) with self-service capabilities, reusable templates, and golden paths to improve discoverability, standardization, and onboarding through the platform.
• Lead the design and scaling of CI/CD pipelines that incorporate GitOps principles using tools like ArgoCD , Octopus Deploy , and GitHub Actions .
• Enable progressive delivery via feature flags , canary deployments , and automated rollback mechanisms.
• Promote best-in-class DevSecOps practices, integrating quality and security checks seamlessly into pipelines.
• Build out on-demand environments for development, QA, and staging through Infrastructure-as-Code and container orchestration.
• Support multi-tenancy and environment rationalization to reduce duplication and inefficiency.
• Define and implement observability standards, including logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting .
• Use tools like New Relic , Prometheus , and Grafana , alongside building custom instrumentation for key platform services.
• Drive incident readiness and operational resilience by enabling actionable monitoring and alerting.
• Drive cloud cost visibility and optimization efforts across engineering through dashboards, tagging standards, and automation.
• Partner with stakeholders to embed FinOps principles in engineering decisions and build accountability into platform usage.
• Establish a systematic measurement framework for platform adoption, developer experience, and operational performance.
• Define and track KPIs like lead time for change, deployment frequency, MTTR, platform usage, and self-service success rates .
• Build measurement into platform tooling for continuous feedback loops.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, security, data, and architecture teams to align on roadmaps and shared goals.

What we expect from you:

• Extensive experience in software development, platform engineering with strong leadership exposure
• Demonstrated leadership in managing senior engineers and driving cross-team initiatives

• Deep experience in CI/CD, GitOps, and DevOps workflows using ArgoCD, Octopus, GitHub Actions or similar tools.

• Proven success in building and operating developer platforms and enablement frameworks.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, etc.).
• Strong understanding of observability tooling (especially New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana) and incident response best practices.
• Familiarity with FinOps, platform cost tracking, and infrastructure efficiency techniques.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.
• Attract, hire, and develop talented platform engineers with expertise in design, development, and security.

This position will be based in Manchester but will require regular travel to London.
What you can expect from us
We won\’t just meet your expectations. We\’ll defy them. So you\’ll enjoy the comprehensive rewards package you\’d expect from a leading technology company. But also, a degree of personal flexibility you might not expect. Plus, thoughtful perks, like flexible working hours and your birthday off.
You\’ll also benefit from an investment in cutting-edge technology that reflects our global ambition. But with a nimble, small-business feel that gives you the freedom to play, experiment and learn.
And we don\’t just talk about diversity and inclusion. We live it every day – with thriving networks including dh Gender Equality Network, dh Proud, dh Family, dh One, dh Enabled and dh Thrive as the living proof. We want everyone to have the opportunity to shine and perform at your best throughout our recruitment process. Please let us know how we can make this process work best for you.
Our approach to Flexible Working
At dunnhumby, we value and respect difference and are committed to building an inclusive culture by creating an environment where you can balance a successful career with your commitments and interests outside of work.
We believe that you will do your best at work if you have a work / life balance. Some roles lend themselves to flexible options more than others, so if this is important to you please raise this with your recruiter, as we are open to discussing agile working opportunities during the hiring process.
For further information about how we collect and use your personal information please see our Privacy Notice which can be found (here) #J-18808-Ljbffr