Head of Platform Engineering

Position overview

At Xapo, we believe in empowering our software engineering teams with a world-class cloud-native application platform. Such a platform automates infrastructure provisioning and configuration, dynamically allocating resources based on application needs. This approach optimizes the entire application lifecycle, enabling efficient scaling, superior resource utilization, seamless orchestration, and rapid recovery from failures with minimal downtime.

By standardizing how software is built and deployed, our platform reduces cognitive load on development teams, allowing them to focus on delivering value. This standardization also streamlines onboarding for new engineers and teams. The Platform Engineering Team (PET) is central to this, not only by building and maintaining the platform but also by mentoring and supporting development teams in leveraging cloud-native best practices.

Our vision is for development teams to consume core platform services in a self-service, autonomous manner. These services are the products of the Platform Engineering Team and include:

• Infrastructure Provisioning: Self-service access to compute, network, and storage resources.

• CI/CD & Developer Tooling: Robust, automated pipelines and the underlying tools that enable rapid and reliable software delivery.

• Observability Suite: Comprehensive tools and practices for logging, monitoring, metrics, and alerting across all environments, ensuring high availability, resilience, and actionable insights.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks: Standardized, reusable patterns and tools for creating and managing services in line with agreed architectural best practices.

Platform Engineering is a critical pillar at Xapo, providing the foundational technology for our innovative financial products. We are seeking a pragmatic and influential Head of Platform Engineering to lead our dedicated team. This role is pivotal in continuously advancing our platform as a product, championing developer productivity and autonomy, and ensuring robust, scalable, secure, and cost-effective operations. You will report directly to the CTO.

Your Role & Responsibilities: Leading the Platform Evolution

As the Head of Platform Engineering, you will embody a product mindset, treating our internal engineering community as your primary customers. Your mission is to deliver a platform that they love to use, enabling them to build and iterate rapidly and safely. You will:

• Lead & Mentor: Directly manage and cultivate a small, high-performing team of 4 Platform Engineers. Foster a collaborative, innovative, and results-oriented culture with a strong sense of ownership.

• Strategic Roadmap & Vision: Define, articulate, and drive the strategic vision and product roadmap for the Xapo platform, ensuring alignment with business objectives and engineering needs. Prioritize initiatives that deliver maximum business impact.

• Platform as a Product: Champion the 'Platform as a Product' approach, deeply understanding developer needs, gathering feedback, and iteratively improving platform services to enhance developer experience and autonomy.

• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and be prepared to be hands-on when needed, contributing to design, architecture, and complex problem-solving.

• Operational Excellence & Automation: Drive the sustainable maintenance, operability, and evolution of our developer platform. Champion cloud-native principles, relentless automation, robust testing of changes, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Develop, implement, and regularly test disaster recovery plans for all platform services, ensuring business continuity and minimizing data loss in the event of an outage.

• Audit Support & Compliance: Proactively prepare for and support internal and external audits by providing necessary documentation, evidence of controls, and subject matter expertise related to platform infrastructure, security, and operations. Ensure platform practices align with relevant compliance requirements.

• Collaboration & Enablement: Work closely with the Engineering Enablement team, treating them as an extension of the platform effort, to ensure seamless integration of best practices, tools, and training. Partner effectively with all engineering teams and stakeholders.

• Build vs. Buy Decisions: Make pragmatic decisions on technology adoption, favoring SaaS and managed services where appropriate ('favor buy over build and SaaS over on-prem') while ensuring we only operate what is absolutely essential.

• Feedback & Iteration: Implement and manage mechanisms for providing high-quality, fast feedback to development teams on platform usage, performance, and upcoming features.

• Future-Proof Architecture: Ensure the platform is architected to handle change effectively, whether from new services, evolving customer needs, regulatory requirements, new tooling, or shifts in demand.

• Vendor & Budget Management: Manage relationships with key technology vendors and contribute to budget planning for platform-related expenses.

What You'll Bring: Skills & Experience

We're looking for a leader who is passionate about building great platforms and enabling other engineers to succeed.

• Proven Leadership: Demonstrable experience leading, managing, and mentoring engineering teams, ideally in a platform, DevOps, or SRE capacity. Experience with small, agile, and flat-structured teams is highly beneficial.

• Platform Product Mindset: A strong understanding of and practical experience with 'Platform as a Product' principles and applying a product management mindset to internal platforms. Familiarity with concepts like Team Topologies is a plus.

• Developer Empathy & Focus: A genuine passion for improving developer experience, productivity, and autonomy. Proven ability to design and support software and/or platforms that are actively used and valued by other developers.

• Technical Depth & Breadth:

  • Extensive hands-on experience in running and scaling platforms within a DevOps culture, including delivering and operating a comprehensive DevOps toolchain and automation frameworks.

  • Strong, demonstrable experience in designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and supporting technologies (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD).

  • Deep technical knowledge across software development, systems architecture, cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), containerization (Kubernetes), IaC (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi), and observability (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack).

• Strategic & Pragmatic Thinking: Ability to translate high-level business and engineering strategy into a clear platform roadmap, making pragmatic decisions that balance innovation with operational stability and business impact.

• Build vs. Buy Acumen: Experience integrating with third-party SaaS providers and a clear, demonstrable understanding of how to evaluate build versus buy decisions effectively.

• Excellent Communication & Collaboration: Ability to dive into technical details with engineers and distill complex information for executive and non-technical audiences. Proven ability to collaborate effectively across teams and influence without direct authority.

• Continuous Learner: Stays abreast of current technology developments, industry best practices, and emerging trends, with a demonstrated ability to identify and implement relevant technologies to maintain a competitive advantage.

Other requirements

• A dedicated workspace 

• A reliable internet connection with the fastest speed possible in your area

• Devices and other essential equipment that meet minimal technical specifications

• Alignment with Our Values.