Platform Chapter Lead in Luton

We are the company – a FTSE-250 listed, £multi‑billion low‑cost airline that serves tens of millions of customers every single year. We fly more than 1,207 routes, connecting 38 countries across Europe, and employ more than 18,000 colleagues. We’re on a mission to make low‑cost travel easy – and whatever your role here, you’ll connect millions of people to what they love using Europe’s best airline network, great value fares, and friendly service.

About the role

We're modernising how we build and ship software across our digital and operational estate. As Head of Platform Engineering you’ll own the strategy, delivery and operation of our internal developer platform, and lead the group of teams behind it. Platform engineering at an airline is a genuinely interesting problem: revenue‑critical services that have to stay up through seasonal peaks and disruption‑driven traffic spikes, a large and evolving estate, and real pace. You’ll set direction, lead through your managers, and own a budget — and while you won't be writing code, you’ll be close enough to challenge technical choices and hold your own in a design debate.

Why now. We’re investing in platform engineering as a core capability, and this is a pivotal hire. There’s genuine scope to shape the teams, define how the platform is built and run, and raise the engineering bar — not to maintain a finished thing, but to build it into something great.

Reports to: Director of Engineering

Direct reports: 4–5 team leads / engineering managers (Platform & DevOps)

What you’ll do

• Lead the teams. Lead 4–5 Platform, DevOps and Developer Enablement teams through their managers; develop your leaders, plan capacity, and hire and grow strong talent.
• Own the strategy. Define and drive the roadmap for our Internal Developer Platform and tooling, set technical direction with Enterprise Architecture, and make deliberate build/buy calls.
• Own delivery. Hold end‑to‑end accountability for delivery — quality, predictability and pace — surfacing risks early and driving continuous improvement.
• Own the budget. Own the operating budget (opex) and headcount, run a cost‑effective tooling strategy, and embed FinOps to manage cloud spend and demonstrate value.
• Drive developer experience. Make the platform something teams want to use — paved paths, less friction — using metrics (e.g. DORA) and real feedback to keep improving it.
• Keep it reliable and compliant. Oversee performance, resilience and observability for revenue‑critical services through peak traffic, and maintain security and compliance (e.g. PCI‑DSS, GDPR).
• Bring the business with you. Align platform strategy with business goals and translate technical trade‑offs into clear decisions, up to executive level.

Requirements of the Role

What you’ll bring

• You live and breathe modern platform engineering – Continuous Delivery, Team Topologies, developer experience and the craft of building strong engineering culture.
• A track record of leading multiple engineering teams at scale (as a leader of managers/leads), setting platform strategy and turning it into delivered outcomes.
• Ownership of budget and headcount, with the commercial judgement to balance cost, speed and risk.
• Strong cloud‑native and modern DevOps background – cloud (ideally AWS) and Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and observability – with enough engineering depth (e.g. Java, .NET, Python) to be credible with strong engineers.
• Excellent communication and the ability to influence at executive level, plus a real record of growing engineering leaders.

• Building or operating an Internal Developer Platform or developer tooling – Backstage especially welcome.
• Familiarity with tools like Terraform, GitHub Actions and Octopus (or equivalents), and FinOps / cloud cost management.
• Regulated, high‑availability or high‑transaction‑volume domains (travel, retail, payments).

What success looks like in the first 12 months

• A clear platform roadmap and operating model the teams are bought into.
• Measurably improved delivery predictability and developer experience.
• A healthy fin‑ops culture embedded and a Product‑led leadership team supporting you.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary 30% bonus potential.
• 25 days holiday, pension scheme, life assurance, and a flexible benefits package.
• Discounted staff travel scheme for friends and family.
• Annual credit for discount on the company holidays.
• ‘Work Away’ scheme, allowing you to work abroad for 30 days a year.
• Electric vehicle lease salary sacrifice scheme.

Location & Hours of Work

We operate a hybrid working policy of 40%-60% of the month spent with colleagues.

Legal Notice

Please note that this role does not meet the criteria for visa sponsorship, and we are therefore unable to consider applicants who require sponsorship to work in the UK.