Platform Engineering Manager

Homeprotect was founded on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK. If you're someone who loves solving interesting problems, taking ownership and working with a team that aims high, speaks up and lifts each other, Homeprotect is a place where you can do meaningful work, grow your career and make a real difference for our customers.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We're a small but perfectly formed team of insurance specialists, technologists, data scientists and customer champions - all bringing individual expertise, an appetite for innovation and a shared ambition to protect the homes and things people love. We work at pace, but we trust our people to work in a way that brings out their best. You'll collaborate closely across teams, have real ownership from day one and see the impact you have first‑hand with flexible working to help you balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life.

We've been recognised as a Great Place to Work UK for seven consecutive years - most recently ranked 29th nationally, jumping 71 places in a single year.

ROLE PURPOSE

As our Platform Engineering Manager, you'll build and lead the team that turns our internal platform into a product — self‑serve tooling and "golden paths" that let our delivery teams ship fast and safely without waiting on a central queue. With Homeprotect scaling ambitiously and our platform function still young (a Principal and two engineers today), we're looking for a proven operator to grow it into the engine that powers our development, data, pricing and AI teams. You'll own the strategy, people and delivery — with security and compliance built in from the start.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and roadmap for our internal developer platform, shifting the team from reactive tickets to a product‑led roadmap measured by adoption and self‑service, not ticket volume.
• Build, coach and grow the platform team — line‑managing the core team and scaling toward roughly one embedded platform engineer per delivery team.
• Run the embed model: engineers embed to enable a delivery team, transfer the knowledge, then step back to self‑serve while staying centrally managed.
• Deliver self‑serve "paved roads" — Terraform modules and state, environment provisioning, API scaffolding, on‑demand dev/test databases, CI/CD and observability.
• Own platform reliability and run — SLOs, incident response and operational resilience across our multi‑cloud (Azure/GCP) and on‑prem estate.
• Build security and compliance into the golden paths by design, meeting our FCA‑regulated obligations without slowing teams down.
• Drive platform modernisation and consolidation — migrating legacy tooling (e.g. TeamCity, Octopus) into a standardised CI/CD approach and supporting our Azure‑to‑GCP direction.
• Partner with and influence engineering leaders across delivery, data, pricing and AI teams you don't directly own, to drive platform adoption.
• Set technical standards and provide credible direction — coaching engineers on better ways of working and making pragmatic, right‑sized build‑and‑sequence decisions.
• Measure and communicate platform impact — adoption, self‑service uptake and delivery speed (e.g. DORA metrics).

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

Essential

• A proven, hands‑on operator who has built and run an internal platform / IDP — not a first‑time manager, and not an individual contributor looking to stay purely technical.
• Track record of driving significant platform change or transformation in a growing engineering organisation.
• Genuine people leadership: has built, managed and developed platform/DevOps/SRE teams, including hiring, coaching, performance and progression.
• Strong cloud (Azure and/or GCP), Terraform/IaC, CI/CD, observability and modern DevOps/SRE practices.
• Comfortable operating in a regulated environment — security and compliance by design.
• Able to shift a team from reactive ticket‑taking to a product‑led platform measured by adoption and self‑service.
• Stakeholder management across engineering leadership — able to influence teams they don't directly own.

Desirable

• Financial services, insurance or fintech background, with experience of FCA‑regulated obligations.
• GCP experience (e.g. BigQuery, GKE), given our Azure‑to‑GCP data migration.
• Team Topologies / platform‑engineering mindset and experience with IDP tooling (e.g. Backstage).
• Experience running an embedded platform engineer model.
• Consolidating legacy CI/CD estates (Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Octopus) and hybrid on‑prem‑to‑cloud migration.
• Applying AI to developer enablement and platform tooling.
• Pragmatism — right‑sizing for a mid‑sized organisation and sequencing delivery rather than gold‑plating.

BENEFITS

• Learning and Growth: We invest in your development through structured learning, mentoring, buddying, on‑the‑job experience and cross‑functional projects.
• Health and Wellbeing: Your wellbeing matters here. We offer private healthcare through BUPA, an Employee Assistance Programme covering legal, financial and counselling support for you, a Wellbeing Centre with online tools and resources, regular wellbeing seminars and workshops, annual flu jabs and an annual eye care voucher.
• Financial Security and Reward: We offer an annual discretionary bonus scheme up to 30% of your base pay, life insurance at four times your salary, and a pension with Aegon. You'll also receive a significant discount on Homeprotect home insurance - with a friends and family discount too, and a staff referral bonus when someone you recommend joins the team.
• Time Off: 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to five additional days each year.
• Genuine Flexible Working: We trust our people to work in a way that best suits them - with flexible working to balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life. We ask that everyone comes into the office at least once a week, as we believe in‑person connection is important for collaboration, culture and building great relationships. You'll receive a homeworking starter kit from day one and can claim towards additional home office equipment within your first six months.
• Purpose and Community: We care about more than just the work. Through our charity partnership with Refuge, the UK's largest specialist domestic abuse charity and regular social, wellbeing and charitable events throughout the year, there are plenty of ways to connect, give back and feel part of something bigger.

UNIQUE AS STANDARD

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. We believe in celebrating difference - everything that makes both our customers and our people unique. We consider visa sponsorship on a case by case basis for the right candidate, so please don't let that stop you from applying. We encourage you to let us know if you need any extra help with your application or have any requirements at any stage of the recruitment journey, we want the process to work for you.

Your data will be maintained in line with our recruitment data privacy policy.

Regulatory Responsibilities

As an FCA regulated insurer, doing the right thing isn't a compliance requirement - it's simply how we work. All colleagues are expected to uphold the FCA Individual Conduct Rules (1–6) and act with integrity, due skill and care, openness with regulators and a genuine commitment to delivering good outcomes for our customers. You'll work within approved processes and authority limits, keep accurate and auditable records, protect data under UK GDPR and our information security policies, elevate risks and exceptions promptly, report incidents, breaches and any financial crime or sanctions concerns (including via whistleblowing), support vulnerable customers with reasonable adjustments, and complete all mandatory training to maintain competence.