Head of Platform Engineering

Head of Platform Engineering Hybrid - Manchester or Bournemouth Salary upto £120000 dependent on experience Who are OnCommerce? OnCommerce is a global selling platform that powers a growing network of retail channels, including: • OnBuy - The only marketplace in the world to give customers instant Cashback on everything • easyShop - An all-new marketplace created in collaboration with the easy family of brands • Comet - The iconic UK tech brand making its return later this year OnCommerce is growing fast, launching new brands and scaling to power the future of ecommerce. Be Part of the Story OnCommerce is constantly evolving. Everyone here plays a hands-on role in shaping what comes next, building brands that make an impact across global markets. There's no red tape or rigid corporate structure; just smart people taking ownership and figuring things out as we build something big together. The pace is fast, priorities shift, things aren't always perfectly set up, and you'll often need to get stuck in and solve problems. But if you thrive in that kind of environment, you'll have real influence, real ownership, and the chance to grow with a rapidly scaling business. The Role As Head of Platform Engineering, you will lead the engineering function and take accountability for translating our technology strategy into high-performing engineering teams and a reliable, secure and scalable platform. You will own engineering-wide delivery performance, capability, standards and operational resilience across both our current platform and target state, ensuring transformation progresses without compromising live trading, customer experience or essential service operations. You will lead through Engineering Leads, create consistency across squads and provide the CTO with clear visibility of engineering performance, capacity, risk and investment needs. What You'll Be Doing • Convert the CTO's strategy and architectural direction into a clear engineering plan, capability model and practical operating rhythm. • Own cross-team engineering delivery health, capacity planning, dependencies, risks and escalation, establishing measurable and increasingly predictable delivery. • Partner with Product leadership to ensure priorities are understood, technically feasible and matched to available engineering capacity. • Own the operating model for live-service support, on-call coverage, incident escalation and service restoration. • Establish consistent expectations for observability, runbooks, service ownership and post-incident reviews, ensuring recurring issues and root causes are addressed. • Own engineering standards and governance across design, coding, review, testing, documentation, deployment and maintainability. • Govern platform-wide engineering decisions and manage the engineering implications of coexistence and migration between legacy and target-state platforms. • Lead, coach and performance-manage Engineering Leads and designated senior engineering roles. • Own engineering workforce planning, capability assessment, succession, hiring standards and leadership development. • Embed secure engineering, automated testing and quality controls into engineering ways of working and definitions of done. • Maintain clear visibility of technical debt, security risk, operational risk and remediation priorities, presenting material trade-offs in business terms. • Provide the CTO with clear reporting on delivery, platform health, capability, quality, risk and transformation progress. What We Are Looking For • Substantial engineering leadership experience across multiple teams in a product-led, marketplace, ecommerce or high-traffic environment. • A strong software engineering background, with credibility across monolithic and service-based architectures. • Experience leading engineering transformation while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform operational. • Proven people leadership, including managing managers, workforce planning, hiring, performance and development. • Strong experience of cloud operations, service reliability, security engineering, incident management and technical debt governance. • The ability to establish engineering standards and improve cross-team delivery in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment. It Would Be Great If You Also Have • Experience with PHP/Laravel, GCP, MySQL, Couchbase or MongoDB, Redis, APIs and event-driven systems. • Experience of composable or MACH-oriented migration on a live platform. • Experience managing blended permanent, partner, nearshore or offshore engineering teams. • Breadth across modern service technologies such as Node.js, Go or Python. How You Will Lead • Lead the function through Engineering Leads rather than taking over routine squad management. • Balance transformation pace with the stability and supportability of live services. • Make standards visible, measurable and proportionate, creating clarity without unnecessary central approval or bureaucracy. • Address underperformance, capacity constraints and capability gaps directly and fairly. • Represent engineering risks and trade-offs honestly to Product and executive stakeholders. Salary and Benefits The salary on offer for this role is upto £120,000 dependent on experience. We also offer the following benefits: • Company Equity - In return for helping us to grow, we will offer you company equity, meaning you own a piece of the business we are all working so hard to build. • 25 days annual leave plus Bank Holidays • 1 extra day off for your birthday • Employee Assistance Programme • Perks at Work benefit platform • Opportunities for career development and progression Location This is a hybrid role, with a minimum of three days a week in one of our offices in Manchester or Bournemouth. Our Commitment OnBuy is an equal opportunities employer. We are dedicated to creating a fair and transparent workforce, starting with a recruitment process that does not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability, or age. Just a heads up - we never use WhatsApp or any other messaging apps to contact candidates. If someone reaches out this way, it is not us, so please let the recruitment team know.