VP Engineering and Reliability

Description

You will lead the engineering and reliability group inside the Technology Platform organization. It builds the systems other engineers rely on: CI/CD, automated infrastructure provisioning, and database and performance engineering.

You answer for the reliability, security, performance and cost of these platforms, for the engineering standards applied across them, and for building a senior leadership team spread across the world.

The company is an enterprise software business with billion-dollar revenue and over 7000 employees on every continent, using AI in its products.

Responsibilities

• Strategy: own and communicate a multi-year technical strategy for CI/CD, provisioning, database engineering and observability, in line with the cloud-first roadmap.
• Set architecture and engineering standards for platform services, and act as the senior technical authority and escalation point for design reviews.
• Build the business case for platform investment, including build-or-buy decisions on tooling, and secure funding through the annual planning cycle.
• Define a staged, risk-managed plan to modernise the Oracle estate through consolidation, re-platforming and migration to managed or cloud-native services.
• CI/CD: own the platform end to end, covering source control strategy, build systems, artefact management, pipeline orchestration, environment management and release automation.
• Drive measurable gains in deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate and mean time to restore across all product teams that use the platform.
• Build a secure software supply chain: artefact provenance, dependency control, SBOM generation, signing, secrets management and policy gates in pipelines.
• Treat developer experience as a product: define golden paths, measure adoption and satisfaction, and reduce cognitive load for product engineers.
• Infrastructure: own infrastructure-as-code standards, modules and pipelines across the cloud estate and the remaining on-premise and private-cloud footprint.
• Deliver self-service, policy-governed provisioning so product teams get compliant environments in minutes, not weeks.
• Enforce guardrails for security posture, network segmentation, tagging, resilience tiers and cost controls, with drift detection and automated remediation.
• Own FinOps for the platform: forecasting, showback and chargeback, commitment management and an ongoing cost-optimisation programme.
• Make sure capacity, resilience and disaster recovery designs meet the business's stated RTO and RPO commitments, and prove them through regular exercises.
• Oracle: own the engineering, automation and lifecycle of the Oracle estate, including Oracle Database on VMs, Exadata (on-premise, Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service), RAC, Data Guard, ASM, Grid Infrastructure, RMAN and related tooling.
• Set standards for provisioning, patching, upgrades, backup and recovery, cloning and refresh, all automated and repeatable rather than run by hand.
• Lead database performance work: workload analysis, AWR and ASH diagnostics, SQL and schema tuning, and Exadata capacity planning.
• Ensure high availability and data protection across the estate, with tested recovery and failover for tier-one services.
• Manage Oracle licensing exposure and cost with Procurement and Legal, and keep a defensible licence compliance position.
• Lead modernisation, such as rationalisation and migration to Oracle cloud services or other engines where justified, backed by explicit cost, risk and benefit cases.
• Work with application engineering to raise database skills in product teams and reduce reliance on specialist intervention.
• People: lead, coach and develop directors and senior managers across multiple locations and time zones.
• Hire and keep senior engineering talent in a competitive market, and build succession depth for critical roles.
• Set clear performance expectations, career frameworks and progression paths, and address underperformance directly and fairly.
• Build a culture of ownership, operational rigour, psychological safety and continuous improvement.
• Manage the departmental budget for headcount, tooling, licences and infrastructure consumption.
• Governance: make sure platform services meet regulatory, security and audit obligations such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR and sector-specific requirements, working with the Trust and Intelligence function.
• Represent Engineering and Reliability at executive and board forums, and translate technical risk into commercial language.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships with cloud providers, Oracle, and observability and tooling vendors, including commercial negotiation and performance management.
• Work with Product, Security, Architecture, Operations and Customer Success on shared outcomes.

Requirements

• Substantial engineering leadership at Senior Director or VP level, including leading other leaders, in an organisation of comparable or greater technical complexity.
• Proven accountability for a platform or infrastructure engineering organisation of 40+ engineers across multiple locations.
• Deep, credible experience in at least three of: CI/CD and release engineering at scale; cloud infrastructure provisioning and infrastructure-as-code; Oracle database engineering, including Exadata and Oracle on VMs.
• Track record of running large Oracle estates in production (RAC, Data Guard, Exadata) and of modernising or migrating them without disrupting the business.
• Delivered a cloud-first transformation while still running significant legacy or specialised infrastructure.
• Experience defining and operating an SRE model: SLOs, error budgets, incident command and post-incident learning.
• Strong commercial skills: budget ownership, vendor negotiation, FinOps and Oracle licensing awareness.
• Experience in a regulated or high-availability setting where downtime carries material commercial or reputational cost.
• Proof of building high-performing teams: hiring senior talent, developing leaders, and improving retention and engagement.
• Desirable: background in enterprise software, SaaS or a product organisation serving business-critical customer workloads.
• Desirable: hands-on familiarity with Azure, AWS or OCI, Kubernetes, Terraform, and a mainstream observability stack such as Datadog, Grafana, Dynatrace or Elastic.
• Desirable: experience with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service.
• Desirable: experience integrating engineering organisations after an acquisition.
• Desirable: relevant degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or relevant cloud or Oracle certifications.

Conditions

Hybrid working is available, with flexibility to suit different needs.

The company is committed to an inclusive workforce that reflects the many cultures, backgrounds and viewpoints of its customers, partners and communities.