Whitespace Work Software Ltd
Senior Platform Manager
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Job Title:
Senior Engineering Manager
Team:
Tech
Reports to:
Head of Engineering/CPTO
Location:
Home-based, with weekly travel to Godalming
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our technical development and operations across our core product set. This role brings together what were previously separate development and IT/ops teams under a single, cohesive organisation. This is a pivotal role in both keeping our on-premises estate running reliably alongside driving application modernisation and pragmatic migration of workloads to the cloud.
You will build a DevOps culture with shared ownership of quality and reliability, and a culture where shipping software and running it well are seen as one continuous responsibility.
You will own the full operational lifecycle, from day-to-day platform reliability and second-line support through to strategic cloud modernisation planning. You are equally comfortable in a 1:1 with an engineer as you are presenting roadmap priorities to senior stakeholders, and you bring the technical credibility needed to earn their trust.
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership
- Champion a DevOps culture where developers share responsibility for operational outcomes and ops engineers are active participants in the software delivery process.
- Establish shared practices, shared tooling and a shared sense of ownership across what were previously separate disciplines.
- Define a target operating model for the unified team, including how work is organised, prioritised and reviewed.
- Work with the Head of Engineering to identify skill gaps and shape hiring as the team scales
- Establish and maintain engineering practices: code review, architectural decision-making, testing standards, and documentation
- Support the team's adoption of AI tooling and modern development practices
Operations & Incident Management
- Own day-to-day operational delivery across production environments, non-production environments, and customer-facing systems across on-premise and cloud environments.
- Ensure systems consistently meet agreed availability, performance, and reliability targets
- Plan and coordinate operational activities: patching and upgrades, backups and disaster recovery, capacity management, and environment readiness
- Own the incident management process end-to-end, from detection and triage through to post-incident review and remediation.
- Maintain and evolve the on-call rota across the unified team; set and uphold incident response SLAs.
- Ensure software resilience through redundancy design, failover testing and proactive capacity planning.
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Modernisation & Improvement
- Working together with key stakeholders, establish and deliver a roadmap of modernisation, including application modernisation and cloud migrations.
- Drive improvements in deployment frequency, lead time and change failure rate as unified team metrics.
- Establish infrastructure-as-code practices as part of the cloud migration journey, with developers and ops engineers contributing side by side.
Security, Compliance & Risk
- Ensure operational practices meet required standards, including ISO27001, GDPR, and Whitespace security standards
- Manage access controls, patching cadence, and operational security hygiene
- Support audits and compliance activities from an operational perspective
Second-Line Customer Support
- Act as the escalation point for complex or high-impact customer-facing issues that require engineering investigation.
- Work with support and product teams to reduce recurring issues through root-cause analysis and permanent fixes.
- Define and uphold SLAs for engineering-owned support escalations.
Delivery & Stakeholder Management
- Plan and manage team capacity and delivery commitments, balancing BAU operational work with project delivery across the unified team.
- Provide clear, honest reporting on progress, risks and blockers to stakeholders.
- Represent engineering in cross-functional forums and customer conversations where required.
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Required Skills & Experience
Essential
- Proven experience as an Engineering Manager or equivalent technical leadership role managing multi-disciplinary teams.
- Strong infrastructure operations background: Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server, networking and on-premises data centre or cloud environments.
- Hands-on experience with cloud technologies, including VM migration, networking, SQL and PaaS services.
- Experience operating and supporting legacy.NET/web application stacks in production.
- Experience in leading modernisation programs and software development improvements.
- Track record of owning incident management and on-call processes at a team or organisational level.
- Experience building or maturing CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or similar).
- Strong people management skills: coaching across different disciplines, performance management, hiring.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate technical complexity for non-technical stakeholders.
Desirable
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Bicep or ARM templates).
- Experience managing DBAs or working closely with SQL Server/Azure SQL at a governance level.
- Exposure to ISO 27001 or similar security/compliance frameworks.
- Background in a B2B SaaS or software product company.
Compensation
- Competitive basic salary
- Annual discretionary individual and company bonus schemes
- 25 days annual leave in addition to bank holidays, in addition to a holiday purchase scheme
- Contributory Pension
- Healthcare
- Life Insurance
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Techscheme
Location and further information:
The post is primarily based working from home. Weekly attendance at the Company’s head office, in Godalming, Surrey, will be required.
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