Head of Platform

About this role

🚀 OUR STORY

Partly's mission is to connect the world's parts and we're doing that by building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts. Our big vision is to accelerate the world towards a sustainable future where waste is eliminated and all replacement parts are universally searchable, accessible and available to all.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we utilise cutting-edge technology to solve challenging but exciting problems that make a huge impact in a $1.9 trillion industry. We've more than tripled our team over the last 12 months and expect to double in size again over the coming 12 months. We're a global team spanning both Europe and Australasia.

We provide a scalable digital infrastructure solution to some of the world's largest businesses and the most exciting startups. Partly's solutions are integrated across hundreds of companies globally, providing the backbone for cataloguing and managing parts online.

Our investors in Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), Square Peg, Octopus Ventures, Icehouse, Peter Beck (Rocket Lab), Akshay Kothari (Notion Co-Founder) and Dylan Field (Figma Co-Founder).

We're continuing to build a world-class team and ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built at Partly, and our values https://www.partly.com/careers are lived throughout every experience.

🖍️ THIS ROLE

Head of Platform is responsible for building and leading the team that provides Partly’s foundation for shipping and operating software: the internal platform, infrastructure foundations, reliability practices, and security-by-default capabilities that let product teams move fast without breaking things. This now extends in two directions: the specialised infrastructure behind Partly's foundational ML/AI capabilities (GPU compute, model training and serving, inference cost), and a platform that natively supports agentic development so regionally-embedded product engineers (including forward-deployed engineers) can move exceptionally fast. You’ll treat platform as an internal product - setting strategy, driving adoption, and partnering closely with engineering and the business to improve delivery speed, uptime, and cost efficiency as we scale.

💻 WHAT WILL YOU DO

- Platform Strategy & Team Leadership: Build and lead the Platform function (SRE, DevEx, Infrastructure, Security enablement as appropriate). Set a clear roadmap, establish ways of working, hire and grow the team, and manage prioritisation/trade-offs.

- Developer Experience : Create the default path for engineers to build, test, deploy, and operate services (service templates, CI/CD, environment provisioning, secrets/config, deployment patterns, feature flags). Focus on adoption and measurable improvements in developer productivity.

- Reliability & Operational Excellence: Own or drive (depending on org boundaries) our reliability foundations: observability (metrics/logs/traces), alerting standards, incident response, postmortems, SLO/error budget practices, rollout/rollback patterns, backups/DR, and reducing on-call toil.

- Infrastructure Foundations: Ensure our cloud and Kubernetes foundations are scalable, secure, and maintainable. Use Infrastructure-as-Code and automation (Terraform for GCP, GitOps with ArgoCD, Python/Bash tooling, etc.) to run repeatable, auditable infrastructure.

- ML & Foundation-Model Infrastructure: Build the platform beneath Partly's foundational models — accelerator (GPU/TPU) provisioning, scheduling and utilisation, training/fine-tuning orchestration, and scalable, low-latency model serving. Own the ML deployment lifecycle (model registry, experiment tracking, evaluation/observability) and treat inference economics as a first-class cost driver, since inference — not training — typically dominates AI infrastructure spend at scale.

- Agentic & Forward-Deployed Enablement: Make the platform natively support agentic development. Design golden paths that are self-service and machine-consumable (discoverable, executable, safe) so AI coding agents and engineers alike can go from generated code to production without the platform team as a bottleneck — with isolated execution environments, guardrails, and observability built in. Ensure regional and forward-deployed engineers can move at maximum speed on a robust but extensible foundation.

- Security Enablement: Partner with security/compliance to make secure-by-default the easiest path (IAM patterns, secrets management, vulnerability management, policy-as-code where appropriate, audit evidence automation).

- Cost & Performance Ownership: Establish FinOps-style visibility and guardrails, track cost drivers, and deliver optimisations that improve unit economics without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity.

- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product/Engineering leadership and stream-aligned teams to understand bottlenecks, influence architectural direction, and ensure platform work translates into real outcomes for customers and the business.

- Hands-on Delivery (especially early): You’ll be technical enough to dive in, review designs, unblock incidents, prototype solutions, and set technical standards, while building a team that doesn’t rely on you as the single point of execution.

Want to learn more about the problems we're solving and the culture we're building at Partly? Hear directly from our team here: https://shorturl.at/iAFUX https://shorturl.at/iAFUX*

🥷 YOUR SKILLS

- Platform Leadership: Proven experience leading a platform / infrastructure / SRE function, including roadmap ownership, stakeholder management, and building teams in a fast-moving environment. You know how to balance reliability, developer productivity, security, and cost.

- SRE & Operations Expertise: Strong grounding in SRE practices (SLOs/error budgets, incident management, observability, capacity planning,…