Head of Infrastructure (London)

About Fresha

Fresha is the leading AI-powered operating system for the global beauty and wellness industry, giving businesses everything they need to run smarter, grow faster and build stronger client relationships. In May 2026, Fresha secured an $80M growth investment from KKR at a valuation of $1B, officially reaching unicorn status and bringing total funding raised to $285M. Already profitable, Fresha is using this investment to accelerate global expansion and drive the next generation of AI and product innovation. Today, Fresha operates at global scale, with offices across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Our platform is trusted by 130,000+ beauty and wellness businesses across 120 countries, with more than 1.5 billion appointments booked to date. Our mission is simple: help beauty and wellness businesses grow by giving them the technology they need to attract clients, manage their operations and run their business in one place.

Role Overview

Head of Infrastructure | The Bower, 207-211, Old St, Tower, London EC1V 9NR | Four days in office, Wednesdays remote

You'll own Fresha's cloud infrastructure and the teams that run it: Cloud Infrastructure, Delivery Platform, On-Call Automation and Reliability, and Performance Engineering. You'll report to the VP of Architecture and work closely with engineering leadership, Security and Data. This isn't a classic DevOps role. We want a software engineer who chose infrastructure. You treat the platform as a product, you build systems that remove duplicated effort and low-impact work, and you build security into the design instead of reviewing it at the end.

Our product teams own their services in production, including their on-call. Your teams build the platform that makes that possible: AWS, our Kubernetes clusters on EKS, Terraform modules, CI/CD, paging, SLO tooling, and the AI agents that triage an alert before a human wakes up. You decide what goes on the golden path, and you make the tough calls when a team wants a one-off.

We want someone with strong opinions who can defend them in writing and in a room, and who changes their mind when the data says so. The cloud infrastructure budget is yours, and you lead the cost savings across our infrastructure. You work closely with Security and your product engineering peers to set the direction together.

We use AI as much as we can. Every engineer gets Claude/Codex/etc from day one, and we're building autonomous agents for SRE and security work. You'd decide how far we take that in production.

How We Build

• Production first: We have no pre-production environments. We test locally, validate in CI, ship behind feature flags, and hold a high quality bar. We ship with confidence because the platform makes it safe.
• Unix philosophy: Each service does one thing well behind a clear interface, and complexity stays at the edges. We optimise for rate of change: an engineer with one year of experience should be able to make a change quickly.
• Optional adoption, mandatory value: Teams choose their tools. Platform features win by being better, not by force. Only security and compliance are non-negotiable.
• Automate first, document second: A check that blocks the merge beats a page nobody reads. We still write down context and decisions, for people and for AI.
• Independent teams: Tribes own their code, deployments, on-call and roadmaps. The platform gives them what they need without waiting on anyone.

What You'll Do

• Direction: Set, present and execute the infrastructure strategy: what we build, what we buy, and what we stop doing.
• Own the golden path: clusters, networking, Terraform modules, CI/CD and observability. Make the right way the easy way.
• Own the cloud infrastructure budget and the vendor relationships. Lead the cost savings, know our cost per booking, and move it in the right direction.
• Keep production first safe as we grow: fast CI, feature flags, and fast rollback.
• Reliability and security: Own the availability of the shared platform and the SLOs for the services your teams run. Get the platform ready for seasonal peaks, with load tests and capacity plans. Own the disaster recovery plan and run the exercises. Set recovery targets with the business, test them for real, and fix what the exercise shows. Get the infrastructure ready to take Fresha multi-region: networking, deployments, observability and security across regions. Build security into the platform: least-privilege IAM, secrets, network policy, supply chain, and base-image patching with deadlines we meet. Lead the response when the platform causes an incident, and make sure the postmortem actions get done.
• Hands-on: Review designs and infrastructure changes, and challenge them when they're wrong. Write code when the team needs it: a prototype, a tool, a fix during an incident. Shape how AI agents work in production: what they can touch, what they must ask about, and how we audit them.
• People and delivery: Lead the team leads and engineers across London, Warsaw and Pristina. Hire, grow, and hold the bar. You set the tone. Run the infrastructure roadmap like a product: clear priorities, small increments, regular updates, and a clear no when something doesn't make the cut.

Our stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka and Postgres. Services in Ruby, Elixir and TypeScript behind a federated GraphQL layer, and Go for internal tooling.

What We're Looking For

• Software engineer first: You've built and shipped production software in at least one general-purpose language. You can read a service's code to find out why it falls over.
• Cloud depth: You've run AWS and Kubernetes in production at scale. You know networking, IAM and infrastructure as code well.
• Security: You design with threat models, least privilege and secrets management from the start. You've taken a platform through a security audit.
• Reliability: SLOs, error budgets, incident command and capacity planning.
• Disaster recovery and multi-region: You've owned a disaster recovery plan and run the exercises, not only documented them. You've built cloud infrastructure across more than one region, including networking, traffic routing and failover.
• Leadership: 10+ years in engineering, with 4+ years leading infrastructure, platform or SRE teams. You've led other leads, and you've hired well.
• Opinionated: You have a clear view on how infrastructure should work, and you can explain it to an engineer, a product lead and the CFO.
• Communication: You write RFCs and strategy docs that people read and act on. You align teams through influence, not only through authority.
• Product and delivery basics: You run a roadmap, cut scope, track outcomes, and keep stakeholders informed without being chased.

Bonus: Postgres at scale, Kafka, or LLM agents in production.

This isn't the role for you if you want to manage people without touching the technology, or if you see infrastructure as a ticket queue.

At Fresha, we value passion and potential as much as specific skills. If you're enthusiastic and eager to learn, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet every listed requirement.

Your Opportunity at Fresha

• Scale: Around 1 million bookings a day across 120 countries, and the payments that go with them, running on a platform we're breaking out of its monoliths while it serves traffic.
• Speed: Around 3,000 deploys a week. The platform you build decides how safe that is.
• Ownership: The strategy, the budget and the teams. You make the calls for infrastructure at Fresha.
• AI in production: A real chance to put autonomous agents into on-call and security work, with the guardrails to make it safe.

Interview Process

• Screen Call - Video call with a member of the Talent Team (30min)
• 1st Stage - Infrastructure and system design deep dive with our Staff Engineer/TL/SRE & VP of Architecture (Up to 2 hours)
• 2nd Stage - Strategy and communication. This would be with our Principal and VP of Architecture (60min)
• Final Stage - Leadership interview with the CTO (45min)

No take-home exercise beyond the short brief. We aim to finish the whole process and give feedback within 4 weeks.

Inclusive Workforce

At Fresha, creating a culture where individuals of all backgrounds feel comfortable matters. We want all Fresha people to feel included and truly empowered to contribute fully to our vision and goals. Everyone who applies will receive fair consideration for employment. We do not discriminate based upon race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying. If you have any accessibility requirements that would make you more comfortable during the interview process and/or once you join, please let us know so that we can support you.