Team Lead, Platform & Engineering

Overview The Team Lead, Platform & Engineering is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for leading the DevOps, Platform Engineering and Environment Management team. The role provides technical leadership, operational support and continuous improvement of environments and interfaces across on-premises and cloud platforms. The role is accountable for ensuring the availability, performance, security and resilience of business-critical application environments through effective incident management, problem resolution, root cause analysis, release support and platform lifecycle management. It ensures operational activities are delivered in line with agreed service levels and performance targets. The role drives automation, standardisation and resilience improvements by reducing manual processes, improving operational efficiency and enhancing service reliability. This includes ensuring platforms meet business continuity requirements through appropriate high availability, backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities. Working across Engineering, Architecture, Delivery and Technology teams, the Team Lead implements best-practice processes, tooling and engineering methodologies to strengthen platform capability, improve service quality and support ongoing innovation. Key Accountabilities and main responsibilities Strategic Focus Lead the support, stability and continuous improvement of application, platform and infrastructure environments. Drive automation, standardisation and operational efficiency across environment management and deployment processes. Establish and maintain platform, deployment and configuration standards. Remove delivery bottlenecks and enable reliable, fit-for-purpose environments. Identify opportunities to improve platform reliability, security, scalability and resilience. Operational Management Ensure the availability, performance, security and resilience of business-critical platforms. Lead incident, problem and root cause management activities. Oversee application and infrastructure releases across all environments. Ensure deployments are repeatable, controlled and low risk. Collaborate with Architecture, Security and Delivery teams to ensure operational supportability. Maintain high availability, backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities. Ensure technical documentation is accurate, current and accessible. Provide operational reporting, service metrics and risk updates. People Leadership Lead and develop a team of Platform, DevOps and Middleware specialists. Build team capability through coaching, mentoring and knowledge sharing. Manage resource planning and workload allocation. Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement. Support global teams and follow-the-sun operations where required. Governance & Risk Ensure compliance with security, technology and operational standards. Monitor service performance against agreed SLAs and KPIs. Maintain patching, vulnerability management and recovery compliance. Identify, manage and escalate operational risks. Drive continual improvement of platform reliability, resilience and service quality. The above list of key accountabilities is not an exhaustive list and may change from time-to-time based on business needs. Experience & Personal Attributes Experience Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Management Information Systems and/or equivalent work experience. 10+ years of IT Experience in relevant technologies or engineering teams. 5+ years of experience leading Platform Engineering, DevOps or Environment Management teams in a large enterprise environment. Prior experience in leading team of platform engineers and support of large complex 24x7 application environments is essential Extensive hands-on experience supporting and troubleshooting complex applications and platforms hosted on Microsoft Azure. Strong knowledge of Azure IaaS, PaaS, networking, storage, identity and access management, monitoring, disaster recovery and security service Strong experience implementing and supporting CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub and related tooling. Strong experience in optimizing processes using DevOps tooling and integration for applications hosted on both on-prem and Azure Strong experience in supporting applications on J2EE, Java, JSP, Apache and Tomcat Strong experience in Supporting multiple Application Servers including JBoss Experience supporting complex integrated applications with API Experience in automation of tasks using Ansible, Jenkins, GitHub, PowerShell, Python and Azure DevOps Availability to work on call after hours and weekend in a rostered 24x7 environment Knowledge of Oracle and SQL Server RDBMS and SQL problem solving & scripting skills is essential Experience with IT Service management within ITSM / ITIL framework Sound knowledge of MS Office Products High level of problem-solving skills to handle complex software and interface support issues Good documentation skills Personal Attributes Strong interpersonal skills to engage with people at all levels of the organisation and build strong relationships and trust with clients and internal stakeholders. Highly effective communication, collaboration and influencing skills. Willingness to accept responsibility and be accountable for service provided. Strong leadership skills with a focus on coaching and developing teams.