OnBuy
Head of Platform Engineering
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OnCommerce: Who We Are
OnCommerce is a global selling platform that powers a growing network of retail channels, including:
- OnBuy – The only marketplace offering customers instant Cashback on everything
- easyShop – A new marketplace in collaboration with the easy® family of brands
- Comet – The iconic UK tech brand, set for a return later this year
We’re growing fast, launching new brands and scaling to shape the future of ecommerce.
The OnCulture
Revolution is not run by committees, red tape, or rigid structures. It’s built by smart people taking ownership in a fast-paced environment where priorities shift daily, and problems aren’t always neatly packaged.
Here, you’ll thrive if you: ✔ Enjoy figuring things out alongside the team ✔ Operate with high influence, clear ownership, and an appetite for growth ✔ Deliver results without horizontal bureaucracy
You’ll be building something big—together.
Why This Role Exists
OnCommerce is transforming its platform and operating model while continuing to trade live every day across Buyer and Seller domains. This dual demand—build the future while protecting the present—doesn’t run itself.
This role ensures both exists:
- Live service resilience without stagnation
- Continuity of delivery, culture, and standards as the organisation restructures
- A balanced engineering function as the team evolves and scales
Role Overview
This is a Senior Leadership Role accountable for: ✔ Day-to-day engineering performance across platforms and domains ✔ Long-term evolution from legacy architecture to modern, composable systems ✔ Ownership of engineering delivery, operational resilience, and standards across all squads ✔ Shaping priorities and trade-offs between operational stability and transformation
Your leadership will define what excellence looks like—making hard calls on delivery speed, risk-taking, and long-term sustainability.
Key Responsibilities
1. Product Engineering Accountability
- Define clear ownership boundaries by domain (Buyer, Seller, Platform) and track engineering commitment across permanent and partner teams
- Track and enforce Throughput and Instability metrics per domain
- Ensure standards are visible, measurable—not aspirational
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2. Transformation Continuity
- Design for disruption during scale-out (nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain migrations, headcount increases)
- Partner with Transformation Lead to prevent delivery gaps during restructures
- Root issues in process and system gaps, not last-minute firefighting
3. Standards & Engineering Governance
- Enforce evolving engineering standards across legacy platforms and the next-gen architecture
- Review roadmaps for operational and security impact, surfacing trade-offs upfront
- Prevent legacy paradigms (catalogue dependencies, vendor lock-in) from infecting new systems
4. People Leadership & Team Development
- Lead and develop engineering capability across squads (DevOps, Platform, Code)
- Build consistent leadership standards by coaching and mentoring Tech Leads
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous learning
- Identify capability gaps, manage on-call rotations, and refine hiring strategies
5. Operational Resilience & Incident Management
- Introduce a two-tier incident resolution model:
- Ops on-call for standard issues (updated company SOP)
- Engineering-led rescues for ígneous technical bottlenecks
- Prevent single points of failure by building depthed coverage (minimum 3 engineers/tier or full-team fallback)
- Champion blameless post-incident reviews and SOP alignment
6. Security & Risk Ownership
- Embed secure coding principles (OWASP-aligned, SAST/DAST releases):
- Treat OWASP requirements as part of "ready for release"*
- Contain security-red-team responses (testing before production shifts)
- Executionalize risk versus risk (Primer equity risk vs. resolution/lifetime cost)
- Route security risk decisions to appropriate stakeholders not paving dark stones solo
7. Technical Debt & Structural Trade-offs
- Track and monitor technical debt alongside day-one delivery
- Remediate high-level risks early; consult Solution Architecture Lead for capital vs. optimization trade-offs
8. Delivery Execution & Owned Principles
- Guide Product Owners (Buyer & Seller) to translate roadmaps into actionable, scoped triage steps
- Design daily standard processes while preserving flexibility (minimal micromanagement, self-service architecture decisions)
- Escalate scenario scope/ownership conflicts up to Product Owner Heads
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Essential Criteria
- Full-stack expertise (Laravel/PHP core), comfortable monolith-and-microservice parallelism
- People leadership—hiring, mentoring, performance management
- Proven track record leading a platform-scale engineering transformation while keeping operations live
- Production experience with MySQL, Couchbase, MongoDB, and Redis
- Cloud-first mindset (GCP at scale on live systems) with hands-on infrastructure and deployment ownership
- Balanced experience—Reviving legacy assets alongside parallel investment in new systems
- Flourish in high-growth, fast-moving environments (startup or scale-ups)
Desirable Criteria
- Documented archaic compositional migration pains (data consistency, sku sync, outlier front-ends) on a trading platform (no newfield practice)
- Multi-cloud experience, strong on cloud vendor evaluation (e.g., AWS post-GCP experiments, multi-cloud least-lie cost concerns)
- Technical curiosity to apply Nodejs, Go, or Python at multiple layers on next-gen platforms
Compensation & Benefits
- Base Salary: Up to £100k per annum (depending on experience)
- Company Equity: Own a piece of the firm you’re building
- Leave: 25 days + 1 Birthday day + Public Holidays included
- Support:
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Perks at Work benefit platform
- Growth opportunities and career progression
Location & Work Model
Application Process: Hybrid or Remote (correct for Live Manchester or Bournemouth-based We’re committed to equity in recruitment. Non-discrimination applies to all protected characteristics.
Just a note: Security will contact only via email or official recruitment channels; WhatsApp or unsolicited personal calls are not.Not us if a headhunter claims otherwise (Escs isn’t a candidate. –Recruitment to report.)
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