At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead a diverse team in developing cutting-edge cloud-native platforms and data solutions.
- Company: Join Keyloop, a leading automotive retail software business with a global presence.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, health benefits, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Dynamic environment with excellent career advancement opportunities.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in a high-stakes leadership role at the forefront of technology.
- Qualifications: Extensive experience in cloud-native engineering and strong leadership skills required.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ 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.
Keyloop Principal · On-site · UK (Reading) 31 de out. Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering terraform aws ecs aws api gateway +11 employer: korecv
korecv provides a collaborative work environment that encourages innovation and professional development. Employees have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects that significantly impact the AI landscape. With a focus on continuous learning, korecv supports its team members in enhancing their skills and advancing their careers.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Keyloop Principal · On-site · UK (Reading) 31 de out. Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering terraform aws ecs aws api gateway +11
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at korecv or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to korecv.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
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We think you need these skills to ace Keyloop Principal · On-site · UK (Reading) 31 de out. Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering terraform aws ecs aws api gateway +11
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at korecv.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at korecv and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at korecv
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If korecv uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
