Head of Platform Engineering, BibliU

• Platform Leadership: 8+ years in platform/infrastructure roles, with evidence of leading technical strategy and teams
• AWS Mastery: Deep expertise across AWS services, not just familiarity. You should have opinions about when to use RDS vs DynamoDB, Kubernetes vs ECS, and the trade-offs involved
• Multi-Region Architecture: Proven experience designing and implementing systems that work across geographic regions with different compliance, latency, and availability requirements
• Cost Optimisation: Track record of meaningful infrastructure cost reduction while improving performance and reliability
• Security Leadership: Experience implementing comprehensive security strategies, not just using security tools
• Data Infrastructure: Expertise in modern data architectures, real-time streaming, and analytics platforms
• Technical Leadership with Team Building: Experience leading platform teams while remaining hands-on technically. You should be comfortable being the most senior engineer on a small team while simultaneously planning for organizational scale
• Operational Excellence: Designing for observability, maintainability, and incident response
• Developer Experience: Treating internal engineering teams as customers whose productivity matters
• Educational Mission Alignment: Understanding that our infrastructure directly impacts student success

Desirable

• Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
• As Head of Platform Engineering at BibliU, you'll be the architect of our technical foundation during a period of explosive growth
• The Challenge: We've grown 150% year-over-year for three years running. Our recent acquisition has accelerated growth even further. Now we're planning for 10x growth over the next five years while expanding into additional products and services
• What got us here won't get us there. We need someone who can architect systems that won't just handle today's scale, but can elegantly expand to support entirely new business lines while serving tens of millions of students across continents
• The Opportunity: You'll have direct influence over technical architecture decisions that impact global education. Your infrastructure choices will determine whether students in Manchester or Texas can access their materials instantly. Your cost optimisation work directly translates to making education more affordable. Your security implementations protect the academic futures of millions
• Most platform roles are about keeping the lights on. This role is about building the electrical grid from the ground up
• You'll start as the technical leader of a 4-person platform team, but your real challenge is architecting both the systems and the organization structure needed to support 8-10x growth
• You'll be working at the intersection of hands-on technical leadership, team building, and strategic platform design—shaping not just what we build, but how we build it as the team scales alongside our business
• Infrastructure Evolution: Transform our current AWS estate from a collection of services into a coherent, multi-region platform that can support 8-10x growth over the next five years. You'll be making architectural decisions that need to seamlessly scale from our current footprint to supporting entirely new product lines and services, handling everything from peak registration periods to the launch of completely new business verticals without missing a beat
• Cost Intelligence: Turn infrastructure spend from a necessary evil into a competitive advantage. We're not looking for someone to just cut costs—we need strategic thinking about where to invest, where to optimise, and how to build cost awareness into our engineering culture
• Security Leadership: Own security posture across our entire technical stack. This goes beyond compliance checkboxes to building security-first thinking into everything we do, from data architecture to deployment pipelines
• Data Platform Modernisation: Lead the evolution of our data infrastructure to serve two new critical constituencies, in addition to existing in-app analytics: modernising retail systems for hundreds of physical campus bookstores (acquired through Texas Book Company) while simultaneously powering sophisticated account growth analytics for our internal teams
• This dual challenge requires building unified data systems that can handle both real-time inventory management across retail locations and complex customer journey analytics for our digital platform growth
• Engineering Enablement: Build platforms and tooling that make our engineering teams more productive, not more constrained. Your infrastructure decisions should make deploying safer and faster, not slower and more complex
• Our Current Technical Landscape:
• Languages: Full stack TypeScript
• Databases: RDS, DynamoDB, Redis
• Cloud: Exclusively Amazon Web Services
• Compute: Lambda, ECS, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: Amazon CDK
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions