Associate Director, Platform Engineering

About Relation

Relation is a sector defining TechBio company developing transformational medicines, with technology at our core. Our ambition is to understand human biology in unprecedented ways, discovering therapies to treat some of life's most devastating diseases. We leverage single-cell multi-omics from patient tissue, functional assays, and machine learning to drive disease understanding, from cause to cure. We are scaling rapidly and building a team of exceptional individuals to push the boundaries of drug discovery. You will work in highly interdisciplinary teams where biology, computation, and engineering come together to solve complex problems that have not been solved before. Our state-of-the-art wet and dry labs in the heart of London are designed to accelerate this integration and translate insight into impact. We are committed to building diverse and inclusive teams. Relation is an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership status, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability, or age. By joining Relation, you will help define how medicines are discovered and deliver meaningful impact for patients.

The opportunity

As Associate Director, Platform Engineering, you will lead the team responsible for the hybrid compute infrastructure, developer platform and scientific compute environments that power Relation’s machine learning and drug discovery work. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will work closely with your team and peers across Engineering, Data Science and Machine Learning to define and evolve Relation’s platform strategy. Our platform spans on-premises infrastructure and public cloud environments, supporting computational scientist notebooks through Kubeflow, model training and serving, internal services and genomic pipelines. You will set the technical direction across these areas, build and develop the team responsible for delivering them, and ensure our platform continues to evolve alongside the needs of our science.

Day to day, you will:

• Partner with the VP of Engineering and peers across Engineering, Data Science and Machine Learning to define and evolve Relation’s platform strategy.
• Own the architectural strategy for our Kubernetes-based clusters and broader hybrid infrastructure, setting the technical standards and guardrails within which the team designs, builds and operates.
• Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team, hiring and retaining exceptional engineers, setting clear expectations and creating the conditions for them to do their best work.
• Own the scientific compute platform, ensuring it reliably and efficiently meets the evolving needs of our Machine Learning and Data Science teams.
• Drive the maturity of our CI/CD pipelines, internal services and developer tooling, treating the platform as a product and our internal engineers and computational scientists as its customers.
• Establish comprehensive observability and robust disaster recovery and failover strategies across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Own Relation’s platform security controls, including IAM, secrets management, network policy and vulnerability management, ensuring the platform meets the data governance standards required of a clinical-stage biotech working with sensitive patient-derived data.

Professionally, you will have:

• Significant experience in platform, infrastructure or DevOps engineering, with a strong track record of building and operating complex production environments.
• Experience leading engineers, either formally or informally, with responsibility for significant workstreams from strategy through to delivery.
• Strong hands-on operational experience, having participated in on-call rotations for production infrastructure, led responses to significant incidents and driven the subsequent changes required to prevent recurrence.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, alongside experience operating infrastructure across hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.
• Experience building, running or evolving MLOps infrastructure, ideally including notebook environments such as Kubeflow, GPU compute for distributed training and model serving.
• Familiarity with batch compute for data-intensive scientific workloads, with an understanding of the reliability, scalability and reproducibility requirements of scientific data pipelines.
• A track record of maturing CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling and observability across complex, multi-environment platforms.
• Strong security fundamentals, with hands-on experience designing and implementing appropriate security controls.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to co-own strategy with senior stakeholders, challenge decisions constructively and communicate platform strategy clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Bonus Experience:

• Exposure to relevant compliance and governance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 or GDPR within a research or scientific environment.

Personally, you:

• Are comfortable working in a matrixed environment, balancing multiple stakeholders and contributing effectively across teams.
• Take ownership of your work, proactively seek opportunities to contribute, and enable others to do their best work.
• Are technically deep enough to earn the respect of a highly skilled engineering team, while being equally comfortable influencing and contributing at leadership level.
• Communicate openly and directly, give and receive feedback constructively, and handle challenging conversations with respect.
• Actively seek out diverse perspectives, build strong working relationships, and contribute to shared goals across teams.
• Embrace challenges with openness and resilience, set high standards for yourself, and strive to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Working Style & Culture at Relation

At Relation, we operate in a matrixed, interdisciplinary environment, where impact is driven through collaboration across scientific, technical, and operational domains. We collaborate, and you will partner with colleagues across multiple teams and projects, contributing your expertise while aligning to shared company priorities. We work together and win together! The patient is waiting!

Recruitment Agencies

Please note that Relation does not accept unsolicited resumes from agencies. Resumes should not be forwarded to our job aliases or employees. Relation will not be liable for any fees associated with unsolicited CVs.