keyloop - Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering

• 1. Leadership & Team Development • Lead and develop a diverse, distributed team of platform and data engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and clear career pathways to ensure high performance and professional growth. • Build and refine the organisational structure of the platform function, including defining team topologies that support product engineering teams as internal customers. • Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on developer productivity and platform reliability. • 2. Platform & Technology Strategy • Ensure security, stability, and scalability are foundational properties of the platform - not afterthoughts - with clear ownership of reliability targets, security-by-design standards, and the capacity to serve a growing SaaS customer base across 100+ markets. • Co-own the multi-year platform engineering roadmap with the Platform Product Leader, translating commercial and product priorities into a coherent engineering delivery plan. • Lead the evolution of Keyloop’s shared services, API gateway, integration layer, and internal developer platform (IDP) to serve as the technical foundation across all product lines. • Establish API-first as a non-negotiable architectural principle - every platform capability must be accessible via a well-governed, versioned API surface before any other access pattern is considered, enabling both internal product teams and external ecosystem partners to build reliably on top of Keyloop infrastructure. • Drive cloud-native architecture decisions, leveraging AWS services and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform/Pulumi) to ensure scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency. • Champion platform security-by-design, ensuring adherence to enterprise security standards, compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), and Keyloop's obligations as a custodian of sensitive automotive retail data. • 3. Integration & Acquisitive Platform Capability • Architect and evolve the integration platform that enables Keyloop to onboard acquired businesses and codebases efficiently, reducing time-to-integration across M&A activity. • Define and maintain shared platform capabilities including identity, authentication, multi-tenancy, data residency, and OEM connectivity standards. • Ensure the platform acts as the enabling layer across Keyloop’s product portfolio, providing consistent APIs, event streaming, and shared infrastructure rather than duplicating capability across product teams. • Design and deliver low-code/no-code integration capabilities that enable rapid, standardised connectivity with third-party systems across the automotive ecosystem, including OEM partners, dealer group platforms, and acquired businesses. Build on modern integration tooling (including n8n) to reduce time-to-integration and enable non-engineering teams to configure and operate integrations where appropriate. • 4. Data & AI Platform • Lead the design and delivery of Keyloop's data platform, including data lakes, data pipelines, and analytical infrastructure to power BI, reporting, and AI-driven product capabilities. • Build and operate the infrastructure layer for AI and ML workloads, including feature stores, model serving infrastructure, MLOps pipelines, and experimentation frameworks. • Drive strategic adoption of technologies including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, EMR, Glue, Snowplow, and Kafka, ensuring robust data governance and quality practices. • Partner closely with product and data science teams to ensure the data and AI platform directly enables Keyloop's AI product initiatives, including KARA and AIME. • 5. Enabling the Agentic Development Lifecycle • Lead Keyloop's transition to an agentic software development lifecycle, defining the strategy, frameworks, and delivery model for AI-augmented engineering at scale. • Develop and roll out the methodologies, toolchains, and workflows that enable engineering teams to work with AI coding agents, autonomous test generation, agentic PR review, and AI-assisted architecture decisions. • Build and own the internal platform capabilities required to support agentic workloads, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) server infrastructure, LLM gateway services, context management systems, and agent orchestration layers. • Drive the skills and capability development agenda across engineering, partnering with engineering directors to upskill teams in prompt engineering, AI-native development patterns, and responsible AI tooling practices. • Establish guardrails, security controls, and governance frameworks that allow teams to move fast with AI tooling without introducing risk to code quality, IP, or data security. • Drive and report on engineering AI maturity progression using Keyloop’s established AI maturity framework, setting stage-based targets, tracking adoption across teams, closing capability gaps, and accelerating teams from early experimentation to production-grade AI-augmented delivery. • 6. Delivery Excellence & Observability • Oversee the execution of platform engineering initiatives, ensuring timely delivery, adherence to quality standards, and effective resource utilisation. • Define and embed observability standards across the platform (OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, SLO/SLA frameworks), giving engineering teams clear visibility into platform health and performance. • Drive FinOps discipline across platform infrastructure, owning cloud cost governance and optimisation in partnership with the infrastructure leadership. • 7. Strategic Collaboration • Collaborate closely with the CTO, engineering directors, architects, and product leadership to align platform capabilities with business priorities and product roadmaps. • Act as a strategic partner to the broader engineering organisation, ensuring platform decisions accelerate rather than constrain product delivery teams. • Represent platform and data engineering at the executive and board level, communicating strategy, progress, and investment cases clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.