Toolstation
Platform Product Lead
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What You'll Do
Location/ working model: Hybrid - Located close to either Northampton or Bridgwater
We are Toolstation. One of the UK's leading multi-channel retailers of trade tools, building supplies, and hardware, catering to both professional tradespeople and home improvers. Operating as part of the broader Travis Perkins plc group, with a network of almost 600 stores, we focus on delivering low prices, quick convenience, and reliable product availability.
This is a deliberately hands-on role, part Product Manager and part Engineer, accountable both for the technology our teams build on and for the outcomes it delivers. You will own Toolstation's cloud platform as an internal product while leading how we build and ship AI and agentic capabilities across the business.
Key Responsibilities Include:
- Core Platform Ownership: Own our GCP/GKE cloud runtime, integration & API gateway, Kafka event backbone, and identity/security platform with published roadmaps and service levels.
- AI & Agentic Capabilities: Lead the management of the Gemini agent platform (with access to Anthropic models), reusable patterns and governance to empower teams to ship AI safely and quickly.
- Stay Hands-On: Write and review IaC (OpenTofu/Terraform, Helm, FluxCD, CI pipelines) and build with AI directly to test standards first-hand.
- Platform Operations & FinOps: Own cloud costs as a platform outcome, attribution of spend, patch currency, availability scorecards, and end-of-life exposure.
- Technical Direction & Modernisation: Act as the accountable decision-maker across architecture/design reviews and drive in-flight modernisation programmes.
- Vendor & Team Leadership: Manage key vendor relationships (Google Cloud, Confluent, Tyk, Datadog) and grow the platform engineering team with SRE, DevSecOps, and agent engineering depth.
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What You'll Bring
- Kubernetes & Cloud Expertise: Substantial hands-on experience running production Kubernetes (ideally Google Cloud/GKE) managing business-critical estates.
- Infrastructure as Code & GitOps: Deep practical fluency in Terraform/OpenTofu and FluxCD/Argo CD.
- Platform Product Mindset: Demonstrate the ability to manage and own our platform as a product (roadmaps, adoption metrics, service levels).
- Commercial & Stakeholder Acumen: Strong cloud FinOps experience, vendor negotiation, and the ability to articulate technical debt/costs to executives.
- Key Behaviours: Decisive, customer-focused (treating internal engineers as customers), pragmatic, curious, and collaborative.
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What You'll Get
You’ll find every opportunity to be yourself and to bring your personality and potential to work. Wherever you join us there will be opportunities to take your career wherever you want; up the ladder, across the business or into another role in the Travis Perkins Group. And because we want to do our best for you, you’ll be supported all the way with training and development. We’ll also equip you with a benefits package that grows as you grow with the company:
- 25 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays
- Competitive Bonus Scheme
- Company pension scheme and life assurance
- 20% discounts across all Travis Perkins companies
- Recognition awards and discounts at over 1000 other retailers
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