Platform Director in Brighton

IntaPeople are currently representing a client based in South Wales who due to a substantial amount of growth now require an experienced Platform Infrastructure Director to join and lead their core production team alongside the Chief Technology Officer & Cofounders. This role is about shaping how their platforms scale, ensuring resilience, and embedding long-term DevOps principles across the business whilst using tools like Terraform/Ansible frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and infrastructure design.

You will manage a team of platform engineers. The team is technically strong and high-output but requires clear priorities, active management, and the kind of organisational structure that experienced leadership brings. Your ability to manage this profile is as important as your technical credentials. You will take the coordination burden off the CTO entirely.

The Platform Engineer will be responsible for running their largest systems within their industry in the UK and having recently launched in the USA, they now are building within this resource area. They are an on-premise first business of which 90% of their workload-intensive applications run on Proxmox Servers which requires robust on-prem operations with hybrid cloud integrations. The technical environment is mature, Linux-heavy, bare-metal first, and deliberately uncompromising. The team is small, highly capable, and fast-moving. What is missing is the organisational layer that converts that output into structured, reliable delivery.

Please note, this is a hands-on Leadership/Director position and not a hands-off people leadership role. This position would suit a Principal/Lead/Manager or Director level Infrastructure Engineer who is looking for more autonomy, responsibilities and progression.

• Proven experience as a Senior/Principal/Lead Platform/Infrastructure Engineer.
• Proven experience with people leadership.
• Proven experience running fast moving projects and teams.
• Strong server experience using tools such as Proxmox and vSphere hypervisor clusters (or similar).
• Experience with HP MSA SAN storage, Unifi networking, pfSense routing.
• Experience working within a cloud environment using cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Digital Ocean.
• Monitoring: Uptime Robot, Grafana, Sentry, and custom application-level tooling.
• Experience using operating systems such as Linux.
• Strong experience with databases such as MySQL.

For the right candidate, this is an opportunity to make a major impact in a scaling, founder-led business with a track record of continuous product development and an ambitious growth plan.

• There is a defined backlog of infrastructure projects that have been deferred by the demands of a rapidly scaling operation. You will own the sequencing and delivery of this backlog alongside live operational responsibilities.
• Platform stability at scale — their infrastructure is doubling approximately every three months. Downtime has direct and significant commercial impact, and incidents can occur at any time.
• AI tooling support — They are actively using and expanding AI-assisted development tooling (Replit, Claude Code, currently cloud-based). They are also scoping local model deployment: Minimax M1 (229B) within two months, with Kimi K2 and DeepSeek to follow later in the year.
• New data centre build — They are relocating to new offices (across the road from their current setup), where they will be constructing their own data centre. The incoming team will be central to this move/setup.
• Reducing the team's production bottleneck. The new manager/director in particular must be capable of owning the platform function with genuine autonomy.
• Resilience: Disaster recovery, backups, and replication across multiple data layers are constant priorities.
• Extreme velocity: They push code to production up to 4 times per day, running fast and breaking things, but aiming to remain online as much as possible.

The core platform team between them covers platform trading core hours across two time zones — UK: 07:00–16:00 and USA: 11:00–22:00. As well as providing out-of-hours emergency support on a rota basis set between the team.

This organisation is a self-funded, profitable business that has set strong growth plans for 2026/2027. They are investing heavily within their own software and infrastructure platforms. This is an excellent time to join the team right now as you will play a pivotal role in shaping how that growth is supported.

The right candidate has a specific and unusual combination. They have genuine technical credibility, enough to earn the respect of strong engineers and make sound infrastructure decisions, but their primary value is organisational. They have previously inherited a high-output but undocumented, unstructured engineering function and turned it into something deliverable without breaking its pace.

They are not looking for a quiet life. They are motivated by complexity, commercial urgency, and the opportunity to build something from a position of genuine ownership.

If your most relevant experience is in a governed, process-heavy enterprise or public sector environment, this role will be a difficult transition. We are looking for someone who has already operated at this tempo.

Platform 'Infrastructure' Director
Bridgend / Hybrid (3-4 days per week)
Salary £85,000 - £100,000 depending on experience
Performance-based team bonus
28 days annual leave (inc. BH) increasing with length of service
New office equipment such as Macbook etc
Flexi time working structure
Cycle to work scheme

For more information please click APPLY now to be considered.

Please note: We can provide sponsorship to certain candidates (in exceptional circumstances) who are already living and working within the UK and have an established home location within a commutable distance of the office. Those on new visa renewals will not be considered. Candidates without this criteria should not apply as applications will not be processed.

Candidates must be willing to work onsite 3-4 days per week in Bridgend/South Wales (UK). We would consider serious relocators but candidates must show willingness to attend interviews in person.