Head of Platform

• Led and managed multiple engineering teams, ideally including platform, infrastructure, DevOps or data engineering teams.
• A proven track record of building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling that engineers actually adopted.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native environments (AWS).
• Experience building and running production data pipelines and the tooling around them (e.g. Airflow, dbt, a cloud data warehouse).
• Strong coding skills (e.g. Python, Go or TypeScript) and a desire to stay hands-on.
• Shown the ability to set technical direction and turn business goals into a platform roadmap.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and stakeholder management skills, and able to win adoption through influence rather than mandate.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with multi-cloud environments (AWS and GCP).
• Experience with DataOps practices such as data contracts, data quality frameworks and lineage.
• Experience with observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) at scale
• Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.
• Experience using AI/LLM tooling to speed up engineering workflows.

CAREER FRAMEWORK: Expected mastery levels
This role sits at Head of Engineering level on the UNiDAYS Software Engineering Career Framework (people manager track).

• Engineering Core: Influence
• Engineering Craft: Influence
• Quality: Evangelise
• Systems Engineering: Evangelise
• Engineering Strategy: Evangelise
• People Management: Evangelise

This is your opportunity to Join the world’s largest student verification network and help shape the future of how brands connect with the next generation. We engage a community of 23M+ verified students and graduates across 115 markets, making us a truly global platform. Our brand is a powerhouse in the UK, and we’re rapidly accelerating our presence worldwide—especially in the US, Germany, India, France, Canada, and Australia.

We partner with 850+ of the world’s biggest brands, bringing their products and services to the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s professionals—driving engagement, building affinity, and delivering real results.

We offer a fast-paced, fun, and social working environment where you can truly make an impact. We believe work should enhance and complement your life, which is why we provide a hybrid working model. You will work together in person a minimum of 2 days per week and work from home for up to 3 days a week. 

We work hard at UNiDAYS, and we believe in fair compensation for that hard work. That’s why we’re proud to offer all employees full access to our comprehensive benefits package.

Our perks include:
25 days holiday per year increasing with length of service, plus bank holidays
Competitive salaries
4pm finishes every Friday
Company pension scheme
Private health insurance (BUPA)
Dental Insurance (BUPA)
Income protection policy
Life assurance policy
Employee Assistance Program
Enhanced parental leave pay
Regular team building activities
£150 pounds towards your home office set up
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.

We're looking for a Head of Platform to lead how UNiDAYS engineers build, ship and run software and data. You'll treat the platform as a product whose customers are our engineers. That means building self-service tools, pipelines and guardrails so teams can move quickly and safely without having to raise a ticket.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll set the platform strategy and grow the team, but you'll also write code, review designs and prototype tooling. A key part of the role is growing our data operations capability, so that data pipelines are as reliable, observable and self-serve as the rest of the platform.