Senior Director, Engineering- X-Ops Platform

We are seeking a Sr. Director of Engineering to lead our X-Ops Platform organization. The leader will be responsible for all aspects of the platform ranging from vision, strategy and roadmap to product delivery and service execution. The leader will coordinate with stakeholders to align business priorities and support engineering teams in delivering secure, high-quality software at scale using modern AI technologies.

What You Will Do

• Set the vision, strategy, and operating model for the X-Ops Platform organisation (e.g., Delivery Roadmap, AI First Developer Experience, CI/CD, Observability, SRE, Cloud & Infrastructure Enablement).
• Lead, coach, and develop engineering leaders (directors, managers and senior ICs), building high‑performing teams with clear ownership and strong engineering culture.
• Own platform reliability, resilience, and operational excellence: incident management, on‑call standards, SLIs/SLOs, post‑incident learning, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with product engineering and threat research leaders to improve productivity and delivery throughput across the software and service lifecycle.
• Drive cloud efficiency and cost transparency (FinOps): budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and optimisation initiatives in partnership with Finance and Engineering.
• Establish platform governance and standards (architecture, security, compliance, data handling, vendor/tooling choices) while enabling appropriate team autonomy.
• Build strong cross‑functional alignment with X‑Ops leaders and other operational stakeholders to ensure aligned feature delivery and service operations.
• Actively drive responsible AI adoption within the organisation: Establish guidance, guardrails, and enablement for approved AI tools and workflows.
• Measure impact and promote best practices that improve quality, speed and operational effectiveness while protecting sensitive data.
• Define and track meaningful metrics and outcomes; communicate progress, risks, and trade‑offs clearly to executive stakeholders.

What You Will Bring

• Cyber Security background and acumen.
• Significant engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and scaling teams in a platform, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps or operations‑focused environment.
• Strong track record of building reliable, secure platforms and improving developer productivity through pragmatic, outcome‑driven investment.
• Experience establishing operational excellence practices (incident response, on‑call, observability, SLOs, post‑incident learning) and driving continuous improvement.
• Ability to set strategy and translate it into execution via roadmaps, prioritisation and clear measures of success.
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to align across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance.
• Commercial and financial acumen, including experience with cloud cost management, budgeting, and performance metrics.
• Commitment to responsible AI adoption—setting guardrails, enabling teams, and demonstrating measurable improvements in productivity and quality.

Desirable Skills

• Experience building and operating platforms at scale in a SaaS environment, ideally with multi‑region cloud deployment.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerisation and observability tooling.
• Strong security and compliance mindset; experience partnering with security teams to embed controls into platform capabilities.
• Experience with organisational design, operating cadence and change management in a complex engineering organisation.
• Exposure to FinOps practices and tooling, including unit cost models and cost allocation/chargeback approaches.
• Comfort working with technical teams and/or technical concepts.
• Experience improving processes, introducing new ways of working, or leading small change initiatives.
• Experience with AI‑assisted productivity or development tools in a professional setting.

Our Commitment To You

We’re proud of the diverse and inclusive environment we have at Sophos, and we’re committed to ensuring equality of opportunity. We believe that diversity, combined with excellence, builds a better Sophos, so we encourage applicants who can contribute to the diversity of our team. All applicants will be treated in a fair and equal manner and in accordance with the law regardless of gender, sex, gender reassignment, marital status, race, religion or belief, color, age, military veteran status, disability, pregnancy, maternity or sexual orientation. We want to give you every opportunity to show us your best self, so if there are any adjustments we could make to the recruitment and selection process to support you, please let us know.