Head of Infrastructure

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined Zozo, operators of Zozotown, the leading fashion e-commerce platform in Japan. This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst, as we accelerate our vision and work together to transform the future of fashion shopping through AI and technology.

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn't, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better choices and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper.

The Role

As Head of Infrastructure at Lyst, you will own the foundational technology that powers our global fashion platform. Reporting to the VP of Data & Infrastructure, you will lead a 5-person org covering Platform Engineering and IT Support. You will own the strategy and delivery of foundational technology which enables our “secure, stable, operable & compliant” strategic pillar. This is a key role for Lyst—offering the opportunity for the successful candidate to have high impact across the whole business, full strategic ownership of the infrastructure roadmap, and the autonomy to make a difference. The role will hit a sweet spot for you if you are happy to dive into a PR or architectural review, but your primary focus is unblocking the team and setting strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Roadmap: Set the technical roadmap for delivering on platform stability, security, and smooth internal IT operations.
• Platform-as-a-Product: Own the design and operation of our foundational infrastructure (AWS, EKS, CI/CD, Observability) with a focus on developer experience and self-service.
• Security & Compliance: Oversee the technology building blocks required to deliver our wider cybersecurity roadmap.
• People Leadership: Manage and mentor a high‑performing team of experts, fostering a culture of autonomy, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Operational Excellence: Lead vendor management, financial budgeting for cloud spend, and incident management workflows.

Leadership and Technical Qualifications

• Leadership: Proven experience in leading high impact infrastructure / DevOps teams in a scaled cloud environment.
• Tech Stack: Deep proficiency with AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Terraform/IaC, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strategic: Ability to balance "keeping the lights on" with long‑term strategic improvements.
• Communication: Comfortable managing senior stakeholders and translating complex infra needs into business impact.
• Security: Hands‑on experience implementing security frameworks and data compliance.

Within 3 months you’ll be

• Developing roadmaps with the VP of Engineering to deliver progress in the Platform, IT and Security strategies of the tribe.
• Line managing the 5-person Platform and IT squad structure to provide direct and indirect coaching and mentoring opportunities to help team members grow.
• Working with the engineering leadership team to understand the needs of our tech roadmap and how to support the org.
• Organising and participating in the squad ceremonies that turn the strategic plans into actionable, measurable progress.
• Collaborating with stakeholders across the organization who can help guide on organizational needs and help set delivery expectations.
• Contributing towards engineering culture through leadership and finding opportunities to give a voice to the work of your area.
• Supporting the Platform and IT squads by being part of the work they do to help understand needs and drive the overall direction of the function.

You’ll support the Infrastructure squads to

• Manage an AWS and Cloudflare platform that leverages EKS, RDS (PostgreSQL), ElastiCache (Redis) and OpenSearch Service to serve millions of customers every day.
• Focus on providing a first‑class development and deployment platform for our engineering teams that encourages ownership of infrastructure and cost through great tooling and documentation.
• Be curious about evaluating new technologies and solutions, and being guided into when and how to apply them appropriately through the roadmap.
• Support the platform through an on‑call rota, and are encouraged to drive automation opportunities in response to incidents to reduce dependency.
• Cultivate a DevOps mentality with the rest of our engineering chapter to encourage strong infrastructure ownership, feedback loops and a self‑serve mentality.
• Take a security‑first approach, leveraging least‑privilege and continuous improvement to understand our risk appetite and provide and progress appropriate controls.
• Help engineering teams to measure application performance and delivering insights, metrics and relevant alerts to the engineering teams with ELK, Grafana and New Relic.
• Develop and support the processes necessary to ensure smooth operation of internal IT that connect all members of Lyst with the tooling and services they need every day.

Our Ways of Working

We all come into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.

In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March. This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.

We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.

Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.

We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.

Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.

Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.

Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them. Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.

Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.