3 Infrastructure provisioning

• Own infrastructure-as-code standards, modules and pipelines across the cloud estate and remaining on-premise/private-cloud footprint.
• Deliver self-service, policy-governed provisioning so product teams obtain compliant environments in minutes rather than weeks.
• Enforce guardrails covering security posture, network segmentation, tagging, resilience tiers and cost controls; implement drift detection and automated remediation.
• Own FinOps for the platform estate: forecasting, showback/chargeback, commitment management and a continuous cost-optimisation programme.
• Ensure capacity, resilience and disaster recovery designs meet the business’s stated RTO/RPO commitments, and prove them through regular exercise.

4 Oracle Database Engineering

• Own the engineering, automation and lifecycle of the Oracle estate: Oracle Database on virtual machines, Exadata (on-premise, Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service), RAC, Data Guard, ASM, Grid Infrastructure, RMAN and related tooling.
• Set standards for provisioning, patching, upgrade, backup/recovery, cloning and refresh — automated and repeatable, not manually executed.
• Drive database performance engineering: workload analysis, AWR/ASH-based diagnostics, SQL and schema optimisation, and capacity planning for Exadata resources.
• Ensure high availability and data protection across the estate, including tested recovery and failover procedures for tier-one services.
• Manage Oracle licensing exposure and cost in conjunction with Procurement and Legal; maintain a defensible position on licence compliance.
• Lead the modernisation agenda — rationalisation, migration to Oracle cloud services or alternative engines where justified — with explicit cost, risk and benefit cases.
• Partner with application engineering to raise database engineering competence in product teams and reduce reliance on specialist intervention.

5 People and organizational leadership

• Lead, coach and develop a leadership layer of directors and senior managers across multiple locations and time zones.
• Attract, hire and retain senior engineering talent in a competitive market; build succession depth for critical roles.
• Set clear performance expectations, career frameworks and progression paths; address underperformance directly and fairly.
• Build an engineering culture characterised by ownership, operational rigour, psychological safety and continuous improvement.
• Manage the departmental budget covering headcount, tooling, licences and infrastructure consumption.

6 Governance, risk and stakeholder management

• Ensure platform services meet regulatory, security and audit obligations [e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, sector-specific requirements] in conjunction with the organizations “Trust & Intelligence” function
• Represent Engineering & Reliability at executive and board-level forums; translate technical risk into commercial language.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships — cloud providers, Oracle, observability and tooling vendors — including commercial negotiation and performance management.
• Partner effectively with Product, Security, Architecture, Operations and Customer Success on shared outcomes.

Qualifications

Essential Experience

• Substantial engineering leadership experience at Senior Director or VP level, including leading leaders, in an organisation of comparable or greater technical complexity.
• Proven accountability for a platform or infrastructure engineering organisation of 40+ engineers across multiple locations.
• Deep, credible experience across at least three of the domains:
  • CI/CD and release engineering at scale
  • Cloud infrastructure provisioning and infrastructure-as-code
  • Oracle database engineering, including Exadata and Oracle on VMs
• Track record of running large-scale Oracle estates in production — RAC, Data Guard, Exadata — and of modernising or migrating them without disrupting the business.
• Demonstrated delivery of cloud-first transformation while continuing to operate significant legacy or specialised infrastructure.
• Experience defining and operating an SRE model: SLOs, error budgets, incident command and post-incident learning.
• Strong commercial capability — budget ownership, vendor negotiation, FinOps and Oracle licensing awareness.
• Experience in a regulated or high-availability environment where downtime carries material commercial or reputational cost.
• Evidence of building high-performing teams: hiring senior talent, developing leaders, and improving retention and engagement

Desirable Experience

• Background in enterprise software, SaaS or a product organisation serving business-critical customer workloads.
• Hands-on familiarity with [Azure / AWS / OCI], Kubernetes, Terraform, and a mainstream observability stack [Datadog / Grafana / Dynatrace / Elastic].
• Experience of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service.
• Experience integrating engineering organisations following acquisition.
• Relevant degree in Computer Science or Engineering; relevant cloud or Oracle certifications.

Additional Information

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.