Director of Platform Engineering (London)

Location: London, UK (Hybrid)

Position Type: Full-time, Permanent

Work model: Hybrid (8 days in office per month)

Reporting Manager: CTPO

Industry: Commodities & Energy

About Us

Zema Global Data Corporation empowers organizations to simplify complexity, reduce risk, and make faster, more confident decisions that drive measurable results. Over the past two years, Zema Global has accelerated its growth through strategic investment and acquisition to strengthen our global leadership. Together we’re helping our customers gain a Decisioning Advantage – one bold idea at a time.

Position Overview

The Director of Platform Engineering is responsible for building the backbone of digital innovation, ensuring that platform services provide speed, scalability, reliability, and security for every product and business initiative. Within the first year, success will be measured by faster environment provisioning, improved deployment velocity, increased reliability of core services, and measurable reductions in cloud operating costs.

About The Role

Zema Global is modernizing its data and analytics ecosystem - transitioning from monolithic, VM-based systems to a multi‑tenant, multi‑cloud platform designed for scale, reliability, and speed of innovation. With platforms operating in both AWS and Azure, this position creates a unique opportunity to define unified practices, tooling, and standards across both environments. As Director of Platform Engineering, you will lead this transformation, setting the strategic direction, design, and delivery of the foundational platform systems that empower every engineering team to build, deploy, and operate software efficiently, securely, and reliably.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute a multi‑cloud platform engineering strategy that accelerates delivery of our data services and client‑facing analytics products while reducing total run cost.
• Lead multiple globally distributed teams responsible for cloud platform architecture, automation, observability, developer experience, and infrastructure scalability.
• Drive adoption of self‑service infrastructure and CI/CD capabilities, enabling teams to ship software quickly and reliably across AWS and Azure.
• Partner with product, security, and data leaders to ensure secure‑by‑design practices and compliant platform practices are embedded across services.
• Implement robust SLOs, monitoring, and incident response processes to enhance system reliability.
• Champion a FinOps mindset - embedding cost awareness into engineering decisions, establishing spend dashboards, and balancing performance with efficiency across compute, storage, and data transfer.
• Foster a culture of automation, continuous improvement, and developer enablement across the engineering organization.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in cloud‑native, DevOps, and platform tooling to inform technical direction and architectural evolution.
• Mentor and develop senior engineering leaders, establishing pathways for talent growth and operational excellence.

Leadership Approach

You’ll lead through influence - aligning engineering excellence with business priorities, simplifying complex systems, and fostering a culture where platform reliability and developer productivity are shared goals across all teams. As a senior technology leader, you’ll collaborate across engineering, product, data, and security organizations to ensure that platform investments directly advance business outcomes and client success.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in software, cloud, or platform engineering with 5+ years in leadership roles managing multiple engineering disciplines.
• Proven expertise in multi‑cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud‑native architectures (containers, Kubernetes, serverless).
• Advanced understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure‑as‑code, observability, and security automation.
• Drive automation across infrastructure and platform operations using Infrastructure as Code and GitOps.
• Strong track record of implementing and scaling internal developer platforms or DevOps transformations.
• Hire, mentor, and develop high‑performing platform and SRE teams; strong ability to coach technical managers and tech leads.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with ability to translate technical strategy into business outcomes.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to align platform investments with business priorities and communicate trade‑offs and risks clearly.

Preferred Attributes

• Hands‑on experience with Golang, Python, or Java for platform service development.
• Experience growing and leading global, distributed engineering teams.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and platform cost optimization.
• Demonstrated ability to embed security best practices into platform engineering, including secure‑by‑design architecture, identity and access management, zero‑trust principles, and automated security testing across CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience partnering with security and compliance teams to align platform capabilities with regulatory standards (e.g., SOC 1 and 2, ISO 27001), incident response readiness, and resilience engineering strategies.
• Use of AI technologies to build and automate CI/CD, SRE, DevOps processes.
• Ability to inspire, align, and scale engineering culture in a complex and fast‑growing organization.
• Experience collaborating across organizational boundaries, forming alliances with other members of the executive leadership team, and building bridges that support functional as well as company goals.
• Ability to identify trends and promote solutions that solve challenges efficiently across multiple product areas.

Why Zema Global?

• Be part of a rapidly growing company revolutionizing energy analytics, shaping how data drives decision‑making across the energy and commodities markets.
• Work with cutting‑edge technology alongside a team of industry experts who are redefining market intelligence.
• Significant opportunity to make a measurable impact on product strategy, revenue growth and customer success, with clear paths for career advancement.
• Join a company culture that values innovation, collaboration and customer‑centric thinking, giving you the autonomy to drive meaningful change.

Our Benefits

• Competitive Salary
• Private Medical Insurance (Health & Dental)
• Life Insurance
• Group Income Protection
• Eligible for discretionary Director’s performance‑based bonus of up to 20%
• Hybrid Working (8 days per month in the London office)
• 25 Days Annual Leave + Public Holidays.
• Professional Development & Learning Opportunities
• Fun Culture & Regular Socials

How To Apply

Please send your CV highlighting your relevant experience. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. No agency submissions, please. No visa sponsorship is available for this position.

Equality and Diversity

Zema Global is committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals and do not discriminate based on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other protected status.