At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead a diverse team in developing cutting-edge platform and data engineering solutions.
- Company: Join Keyloop, a leading automotive retail software business with a global presence.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, career growth opportunities, and a dynamic work environment.
- Other info: Be part of a transformative journey in a high-growth, innovative company.
- Why this job: Make a significant impact on the future of automotive technology and AI.
- Qualifications: Extensive experience in cloud-native engineering and leadership in tech environments.
The predicted salary is between 100000 - 150000 £ per year.
Keyloop is a leading automotive retail software business, operating across 100+ markets and backed by Francisco Partners. As we accelerate our transition to a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform, Platform & Data Engineering sits at the heart of our technical strategy. This is a high-impact leadership role reporting directly to the CTO, responsible for setting and executing the platform strategy that enables Keyloop's product engineering teams, powers our data and AI capabilities, and provides the integration fabric for an acquisitive, multi-product business.
Responsibilities:
- Leadership & Team Development
- Lead and develop a diverse, distributed team of platform and data engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and clear career pathways to ensure high performance and professional growth.
- Build and refine the organisational structure of the platform function, including defining team topologies that support product engineering teams as internal customers.
- Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on developer productivity and platform reliability.
- Platform & Technology Strategy
- Ensure security, stability, and scalability are foundational properties of the platform - not afterthoughts - with clear ownership of reliability targets, security-by-design standards, and the capacity to serve a growing SaaS customer base across 100+ markets.
- Co-own the multi-year platform engineering roadmap with the Platform Product Leader, translating commercial and product priorities into a coherent engineering delivery plan.
- Lead the evolution of Keyloop’s shared services, API gateway, integration layer, and internal developer platform (IDP) to serve as the technical foundation across all product lines.
- Establish API-first as a non-negotiable architectural principle - every platform capability must be accessible via a well-governed, versioned API surface before any other access pattern is considered.
- Drive cloud-native architecture decisions, leveraging AWS services and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform/Pulumi) to ensure scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
- Champion platform security-by-design, ensuring adherence to enterprise security standards, compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), and Keyloop's obligations as a custodian of sensitive automotive retail data.
- Integration & Acquisitive Platform Capability
- Architect and evolve the integration platform that enables Keyloop to onboard acquired businesses and codebases efficiently, reducing time-to-integration across M&A activity.
- Define and maintain shared platform capabilities including identity, authentication, multi-tenancy, data residency, and OEM connectivity standards.
- Ensure the platform acts as the enabling layer across Keyloop’s product portfolio, providing consistent APIs, event streaming, and shared infrastructure rather than duplicating capability across product teams.
- Design and deliver low-code/no-code integration capabilities that enable rapid, standardised connectivity with third-party systems across the automotive ecosystem.
- Data & AI Platform
- Lead the design and delivery of Keyloop's data platform, including data lakes, data pipelines, and analytical infrastructure to power BI, reporting, and AI-driven product capabilities.
- Build and operate the infrastructure layer for AI and ML workloads, including feature stores, model serving infrastructure, MLOps pipelines, and experimentation frameworks.
- Drive strategic adoption of technologies including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, EMR, Glue, Snowplow, and Kafka, ensuring robust data governance and quality practices.
- Partner closely with product and data science teams to ensure the data and AI platform directly enables Keyloop's AI product initiatives.
- Enabling the Agentic Development Lifecycle
- Lead Keyloop's transition to an agentic software development lifecycle, defining the strategy, frameworks, and delivery model for AI-augmented engineering at scale.
- Develop and roll out the methodologies, toolchains, and workflows that enable engineering teams to work with AI coding agents, autonomous test generation, agentic PR review, and AI-assisted architecture decisions.
- Build and own the internal platform capabilities required to support agentic workloads.
- Drive the skills and capability development agenda across engineering, partnering with engineering directors to upskill teams in prompt engineering, AI-native development patterns, and responsible AI tooling practices.
- Establish guardrails, security controls, and governance frameworks that allow teams to move fast with AI tooling without introducing risk to code quality, IP, or data security.
- Drive and report on engineering AI maturity progression using Keyloop’s established AI maturity framework.
- Delivery Excellence & Observability
- Oversee the execution of platform engineering initiatives, ensuring timely delivery, adherence to quality standards, and effective resource utilisation.
- Define and embed observability standards across the platform, giving engineering teams clear visibility into platform health and performance.
- Drive FinOps discipline across platform infrastructure, owning cloud cost governance and optimisation.
- Strategic Collaboration
- Collaborate closely with the CTO, engineering directors, architects, and product leadership to align platform capabilities with business priorities and product roadmaps.
- Act as a strategic partner to the broader engineering organisation, ensuring platform decisions accelerate rather than constrain product delivery teams.
- Represent platform and data engineering at the executive and board level, communicating strategy, progress, and investment cases clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Required Skills & Experience:
- Technical & Architectural
- Deep experience in cloud-native platform engineering on AWS, including IaC (Terraform or Pulumi), containerisation (Kubernetes/ECS), event streaming (Kafka), and API gateway patterns.
- Proven track record designing and operating shared platform services in a complex, multi-product enterprise SaaS environment.
- Hands-on background in data platform engineering: data lake architecture, ELT pipelines, and familiarity with Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS data services.
- Experience building AI/ML infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of platform observability.
- Security-first mindset with hands-on experience in enterprise security practices.
- Leadership & Delivery
- Extensive engineering leadership experience, with a proven record of building, scaling, and developing high-performing distributed engineering teams.
- Experience operating within an acquisitive software business.
- Familiarity with modern delivery frameworks and the ability to adapt methodology to the needs of a platform organisation.
- Strong FinOps capability.
- Agentic Engineering & AI Tooling
- Practical experience adopting and scaling AI-native development tooling across engineering organisations.
- Understanding of agentic software delivery patterns.
- Ability to define governance frameworks that enable AI-augmented development at pace.
- Passion for driving engineering culture change.
- Communication & Stakeholder Management
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex platform and data engineering decisions into clear narratives.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analysing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering employer: Keyloop
Keyloop is an exceptional employer that fosters a collaborative and innovative work culture, perfect for those passionate about cutting-edge technology in the AI space. Located in the United Kingdom, employees benefit from a dynamic environment that encourages professional growth through continuous learning opportunities and cross-functional teamwork. With a focus on building impactful customer experiences, Keyloop offers a unique chance to contribute to transformative projects while enjoying a supportive atmosphere.
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We think you need these skills to ace Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering
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