Associate Director - Platform Engineering

Blend is seeking an Associate Director to lead the Platform Engineering workstream on a global product delivery. This is a senior, client-facing leadership role. The individual will own the platform engineering workstream end-to-end, act as the primary escalation point to the Delivery Leads, make key technical decisions in partnership with the client, and actively develop junior members of the platform team.

What You Will Do

• Lead on project delivery and governance for the Platform Engineering workstream.
• Support and develop Platform Engineers across the engagement, providing technical direction and day-to-day guidance.
• Build and maintain a scalable, secure, and reliable cloud platform on Microsoft Azure, covering infrastructure, networking, identity, and environment strategy.
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and environment automation for engineering and data workloads.
• Define and promote best practices for infrastructure as code, security, monitoring, and observability across the team.
• Act as the primary escalation point to Delivery Leads for platform risks, blockers, and issues bringing context and recommended options, not just problems.
• Operate as Blend's senior technical for representative platform engineering in client-facing settings, building trusted relationships with client engineering and architecture stakeholders.
• Own key platform engineering decisions when working alongside the client, translating technical trade-offs into clear, business-relevant guidance.
• Champion good engineering practices to minimise technical debt and ensure long-term platform reliability.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, setting clear standards for quality, delivery behaviours, and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to Blend's engineering strategy and capability development alongside delivery leadership.

What You Need

• Proven ability to lead platform engineering workstreams on large, complex custom system development programmes with direct client accountability.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing, building, and operating secure, scalable cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.
• Strong background in DevOps principles, site reliability engineering, or platform engineering in a consulting or professional services context.
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code, Terraform in particular — including modular design, remote state, and CI/CD integration.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and automation using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent tooling.
• Strong understanding of networking, security, and identity management in cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience with containerisation and orchestration, Docker, Kubernetes, AKS.
• Experience designing and managing decoupled microservice and event-driven architectures at scale.
• Knowledge of monitoring, logging, and observability platforms
• Experience implementing cost optimisation, scaling strategies, and performance monitoring in production systems.
• Demonstrable experience working directly with clients at a senior technical level, including leading workshops, design sessions, and technical reviews.
• Proven track record mentoring and developing platform and DevOps engineers across seniority levels.
• Comfortable operating in a global delivery context with distributed teams.

Technical Skills

• Microsoft Azure: Deep expertise across AKS, App Services, API Management, networking, Key Vault, Managed Identities, Azure Monitor, and Storage. Experience designing multi-region, enterprise-scale architectures.
• Terraform / IaC: Advanced Terraform skills including modular design, remote state management, workspace strategies, and CI/CD integration. Able to set team standards and conduct code reviews.
• Microservices: Proven design and delivery of decoupled microservices at scale, API gateway patterns, event-driven architecture, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), service mesh, and observability.
• DevSecOps & CI/CD: Secure delivery pipelines, shift-left security practices, policy-as-code (Azure Policy, OPA), and automated testing within platform pipelines.
• Cloud Governance: RBAC, networking controls, tagging standards, cost management, and compliance baselines across Azure environments.
• Observability: Monitoring, logging, and alerting across platform and application layers
• Security & Identity: Networking security, Managed Identities, Key Vault, and cloud security best practices in a complex enterprise environment.

Nice To Have

• Hands-on experience with Databricks on Azure, including Unity Catalog, VNet injection, cluster policies, and integration with Azure storage and identity.
• Experience with security and compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR).
• Proven ability to build platform foundations for data and AI workloads.
• In-depth experience with Azure DevOps and GitHub Advanced Security features.
• Relevant certifications: Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, or equivalent.