Associate Director, Platform Engineering

The role

You will lead the team responsible for hybrid compute infrastructure, developer platform, and scientific compute environments. You will define platform strategy and set technical direction for Kubernetes-based clusters and cloud environments.

What you will do

• Partner with the VP of Engineering and peers to define and evolve platform strategy.
• Own the architectural strategy for Kubernetes-based clusters and hybrid infrastructure.
• Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team.
• Own the scientific compute platform for Machine Learning and Data Science teams.
• Drive the maturity of CI/CD pipelines, internal services, and developer tooling.
• Establish observability and disaster recovery and failover strategies.
• Own platform security controls including IAM, secrets management, and network policy.

Required qualifications

• Significant experience in platform, infrastructure or DevOps engineering.
• Experience leading engineers, formally or informally, with responsibility for workstreams from strategy to delivery.
• Strong hands-on operational experience including on-call rotations and incident response.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes.
• Experience operating infrastructure across hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.
• Experience building, running or evolving MLOps infrastructure.
• Familiarity with batch compute for data-intensive scientific workloads.
• Track record of maturing CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling and observability.
• Strong security fundamentals with hands-on experience designing and implementing security controls.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to have

• Exposure to relevant compliance and governance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 or GDPR within a research or scientific environment.

About the company

Relation is a TechBio company developing medicines by leveraging single-cell multi-omics, functional assays, and machine learning. They operate state-of-the-art wet and dry labs in London.