Platform Engineering Manager

We are a niche, personal lines insurer generating £400m+ GWP operating as two insurance companies in the UK and Malta. Our major product lines are travel insurance, private medical & dental insurance, and specialist insurance products including gadget, warranties, events, and home and motor ancillary products. With long standing agreements and strong relationships with affinity clients such as the Post Office, EasyJet and Saga in the UK and Vhi in Ireland, we also operate a direct-to-consumer brand, Columbus Direct which operates as a travel insurer in the UK and Italy.

Collinson Insurance drives primarily short tail, higher utilisation, niche insurance products and provides deep expertise for in-house claims and assistance servicing for travel and health products and works with strategic 3rd parties for its claims and assistance activities covering all other specialty insurance products.

The Insurance executive team have an ambitious growth strategy to continue to expand profitably while ensuring equal focus on delivering this in an efficient and effective way across the key enabling functions as the business continues to scale and diversify across products and geographies.

Purpose of the Role

The Platform Engineering Manager is responsible for the shared technology platforms, cloud services, platform tooling and operational capabilities for the Insurance technology estate.

The role leads Platform Engineering across the Insurance technology estate, providing the platforms, tooling and operational capabilities that enable secure, reliable software delivery.

The role provides leadership for the Platform Engineering chapter and supports the development of DevOps Engineers across the Insurance technology estate, promoting consistent platform practices and engineering standards.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Services & Operations

• Own and operate shared platform services, cloud platforms and platform tooling, ensuring they remain reliable and maintain uptime within agreed service levels.
• Oversee third party platform suppliers and service providers ensuring effective Service Delivery and adherence to agreed service levels and that they remain compliant to regulatory expectations.
• Lead platform operations, observability, incident management, root cause analysis, annual disaster recovery testing and operational resilience activities.
• Manage platform lifecycle activities, including technical debt reduction, end of support risks and continual service improvement.
• Manage and reduce vulnerabilities identified by automated and manual security testing.
• Define and maintain platform engineering standards and approved tooling, providing technical leadership and guidance to DevOps Engineers.
• Ensure platform services and platform tooling remain aligned with approved Enterprise Architecture standards and technology roadmap.

Security Engineering

• Embed Secure-by-Design principles and secure engineering practices across platform services, engineering tooling and Engineering teams.
• Ensure platform services, engineering tooling and third-party platform solutions are implemented and operated in accordance with approved security policies, standards and control frameworks.
• Work with Security team on vulnerability remediation, platform hardening and security improvement initiatives.
• Ensure platform services provide appropriate security, monitoring, logging and auditability capabilities.
• Support security assurance, audit and remediation activities relating to platform services and engineering tooling.

Leadership

• Lead and support Platform Engineering chapter members through coaching, performance management and career development.
• Provide guidance and mentoring to DevOps Engineers embedded within product teams, supporting consistent engineering practices and capability development.
• Support recruitment, onboarding and retention activities within the Platform Engineering chapter.
• Encourage knowledge sharing, collaboration and continuous improvement across Platform Engineering and wider engineering teams.
• Maintain visibility of team capacity, skills development needs and operational risks.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability and engineering professionalism.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience Required

• Leading a Platform Engineering, DevOps, Cloud Operations or Infrastructure Engineering team.
• Operating and supporting cloud platforms and technology services within a production environment.
• Managing service reliability, incident response, operational resilience and continual service improvement activities.
• Implementing and supporting Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, automation tooling and engineering enablement practices.
• Evaluating, implementing or supporting AI-enabled engineering capabilities, including developer productivity tooling, automation solutions across engineering teams.
• Working with third-party technology suppliers and managed service providers.
• Supporting secure engineering practices and collaborating with Security, Architecture and Engineering teams.
• Coaching and developing engineers within either direct or matrix management structures.

Technical Knowledge

• AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms.
• Infrastructure as Code and automation tooling.
• CI/CD platforms and developer productivity tooling.
• Observability, monitoring and operational reporting practices.
• Secure engineering and security-by-design principles.
• Incident management, operational resilience and disaster recovery concepts.
• AI-assisted software engineering practices and the application of AI agents within DevOps, SecOps, FinOps and operational support workflows.
• Modern Platform Engineering, DevOps and cloud operations practices

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