Engineering Manager (Infrastructure) in Croydon

We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager (Infrastructure) to lead the teams responsible for the core platform, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and MLOps capabilities that underpin our data, analytics, and AI ecosystem. In this role, you will lead engineering teams responsible for building and operating the foundational platforms that enable reliable, secure, scalable software delivery across the organisation. Covering both Platform Engineering and DevOps/MLOps, your teams will provide the infrastructure, tooling, automation, and operational excellence that support every engineering function within the hub.

This position is focused on people leadership, team development, hiring, organisational scaling, and delivery management. You'll partner closely with senior technical leaders who own the architecture and technical direction while you create the environment, structure, and culture that allow teams to perform at their best.

What You'll Do

• Lead and Develop Platform Engineering Teams
  • Manage, mentor, and develop a diverse engineering organisation spanning Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, MLOps, Security Engineering, and Infrastructure Engineering.
  • Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, talent retention, and succession planning.
  • Support senior engineers as they grow into technical leadership and subject matter expert roles.
  • Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
• Build Organisational Capacity
  • Own resource planning and workforce strategy across multiple infrastructure disciplines.
  • Balance strategic platform investments with operational priorities and service reliability commitments.
  • Ensure teams have the capacity and capabilities required to support growing engineering and AI workloads.
  • Partner with senior stakeholders on team design, hiring plans, and long-term organisational growth.
• Enable a Scalable Engineering Platform
  • Partner with technical leaders responsible for cloud platforms, developer tooling, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, GitOps, and MLOps capabilities.
  • Support the delivery and adoption of engineering "golden paths" that simplify and standardise software development across teams.
  • Drive initiatives that improve platform reliability, operational efficiency, developer productivity, and onboarding experiences.
• Drive Reliability, Security, and Operational Excellence
  • Oversee teams responsible for platform reliability, observability, incident readiness, infrastructure automation, and operational processes.
  • Support the continuous evolution of security and DevSecOps practices across infrastructure and software delivery pipelines.
  • Ensure effective operational planning, service health reporting, change management, and incident coordination.
  • Partner with governance and security stakeholders to maintain strong compliance, auditability, and risk management standards.
• Collaborate Across Engineering and Business Functions
  • Work closely with Engineering Managers, technical leads, delivery teams, security teams, and senior leadership to align priorities and roadmaps.
  • Facilitate cross-team planning, dependency management, and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Represent infrastructure and platform engineering in leadership forums and strategic planning discussions.
  • Translate platform metrics, reliability data, and operational insights into meaningful business outcomes.
• Talent Acquisition and Team Growth
  • Lead structured hiring processes across infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, security, and MLOps disciplines.
  • Establish effective assessment frameworks and interview practices that maintain a high hiring bar.
  • Build scalable onboarding and development programmes that enable engineers to succeed quickly and grow their careers.

What You'll Bring

• Experience
  • 8+ years of engineering experience with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership or people management role.
  • Proven experience leading Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or Cloud Engineering teams.
  • Experience managing multiple teams or engineering functions within a complex technology organisation.
  • Strong background in performance management, career development, workforce planning, and organisational scaling.
  • Experience building and growing high-performing engineering teams through structured hiring and talent development.
• Technical Understanding
  • You won't be the primary technical decision-maker, but you'll bring strong technical credibility across modern infrastructure and platform practices, including:
  • Kubernetes and cloud-native platform engineering.
  • Azure cloud services and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
  • CI/CD pipelines and GitOps approaches using technologies such as GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.
  • Platform observability, monitoring, SLOs, SLIs, and distributed tracing.
  • DevSecOps practices and security automation within software delivery pipelines.
  • FinOps principles including cloud cost optimisation, budgeting, and usage governance.
  • Workflow orchestration and automation platforms.
  • Modern MLOps and AI platform environments.
• Leadership Skills
  • Coaching-oriented leadership style focused on empowering technical experts.
  • Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.
  • Ability to balance operational priorities with long-term strategic investments.
  • Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Comfortable working in large, matrixed organisations with multiple stakeholders.

What We Offer

Our employees play an integral part in our success as a business. We appreciate that each of our employees are unique and have unique needs, ambitions and we enjoy being a part of their journey. We are there to empower and encourage you with your personal and professional development ensuring that you take control by offering a large variety of courses and targeted development programs. All that in a global environment where international mobility and career progression are encouraged. Caring for your health and wellbeing is key priority for us. This is why we build Work Well programs to providing you with peace of mind and give the flexibility in planning and arranging for a better work-life balance.

At Allianz we use some AI-assisted technology as part of our recruitment process to help match candidates to roles based on skills, experience, job title, and location. AI supports our recruiters by enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of candidate assessments and job recommendations, while all applications are reviewed by our recruitment team and final hiring decisions are made by humans.

Allianz Group is one of the most trusted insurance and asset management companies in the world. Caring for our employees, their ambitions, dreams and challenges is what makes us a unique employer. We are united by a shared commitment: to put our customers first and at the center of everything we do. Their needs inspire our thinking and guide our actions. Together, we can build an environment where everyone feels empowered and confident to explore, grow and shape a better future – for our customers and for the world around us.

At Allianz, we stand for unity: we believe that a united world is a more prosperous world, and we are dedicated to consistently advocating for equal opportunities for all. The foundation for this is our inclusive workplace, where people and performance both matter, and where integrity, fairness, inclusion and trust are at the heart of our culture. We therefore welcome applications regardless of race, ethnicity or cultural background, age, gender, nationality, religion, social class, disability or sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected under applicable local laws and regulations.

Join us. Let's care for tomorrow.

Note: Having different strengths, experiences, perspectives and approaches is an integral part of Allianz‘ company culture. One means to achieve this is a regular rotation of Allianz employees across functions, Allianz entities and geographies. Therefore, Allianz expects from its employees a general openness and a high motivation to regularly change positions and collect experiences across Allianz Group.