Platform Technical Lead (OpenShift)

The Platform Technical Lead is the technical owner of the platform product. Reporting directly into the Head Of System Engineering (HoSE) and whilst specific responsibilities will be dependent upon the changing needs of the Tesco business, the following provides an overview of the role’s key responsibilities and measures

They own how the platform is designed, built, operated and evolved, and are accountable for its technical integrity in production. They partner with the Platform Product Lead, who owns product direction and stakeholder outcomes; the Platform Technical Lead owns the engineering that delivers them.

Technical authority and design

• Act as design authority for the platform: own the technical roadmap, author and ratify Architecture Decision Records, run design review, and hold the line on standards. Decisions are documented, evidenced and reversible-by-design where possible.
• Own the target architecture for the platform across its full stack: OpenShift (HCP / Virtualization), GitOps delivery (Argo CD), multi-cluster management and policy (ACM, Gatekeeper/OPA), observability, networking and storage integration, and infrastructure-as-code. Set and enforce the paved-road patterns the team builds to.
• Evaluate new technologies against product outcomes, not novelty: run structured spikes with defined success criteria, and make adopt/hold/reject calls with written rationale.

Platform as a Product

Treat the consuming product teams as customers. Own the platform's service interface to those products: API and interface contracts, versioning and deprecation discipline, capacity and performance guarantees, and the documentation that lets product teams consume the platform without needing to understand its internals. Measure the experience (integration lead time, breaking-change incidents, ticket deflection) and improve it deliberately.

• Understand how infrastructure product teams expose the platform to application engineering teams, and factor that end-to-end developer experience into platform design decisions - the platform is only as good as what the products can build on it.
• Own the technical content of the platform product roadmap jointly with the Platform Lead: they prioritise the what, the Platform Technical Lead defines the how, effort, sequencing and technical risk.
• Eliminate toil systematically: everything operated more than twice is a candidate for automation; anything manual in the production path is a defect on the backlog.
• Develop and maintain DevOps practices within the Platform Team. The team owns and supports what they build.

Production ownership

• Accountable for the platform's operational integrity: SLOs, error budgets, capacity and performance. Lead technical response on novel or high-severity incidents, own the post-incident review, and convert findings into engineering change, not just runbook entries.
• Ensure everything the team ships is production-grade: designed, documented, tested, observable and handoff-ready, with no single person as the sole holder of any critical capability.

People and capability

• Own the technical development of engineers to validate skill assessments against production evidence, set stretch assignments against capability gaps, and coach seniors towards design ownership.
• Represent the platform with authority in cross-team and architecture forums; translate architectural strategy into designs that can actually deliver, and push back with evidence where strategy and practicality conflict.

Skills / Experience Required

• Proven technical leadership of a platform or product engineering team: sets direction, owns design decisions, and is accountable for what ships to production.
• Acts as design authority: authors and maintains high-quality design records (ADRs or equivalent), runs design review, and holds standards without becoming a bottleneck.
• Treats the platform as a product: understands consuming teams as customers, designs and versions interfaces deliberately, and measures the consumption experience rather than assuming it.
• Structured, analytical approach to complex troubleshooting: forms hypotheses, isolates variables, resolves incidents not previously seen, and converts findings into engineering change.
• Communicates technical design and risk with authority to mixed audiences, from engineers to senior non-technical stakeholders, and can defend or revise a position based on evidence.
• Translates Tesco Technology and business strategy into a credible technical roadmap: sequencing, effort and risk, not just ambition.
• Coaches and develops engineers with evidence: validates skill assessments against production work, sets stretch assignments against capability gaps, and builds succession so no critical capability rests on one person.
• Works product-first within agile delivery: outcomes over outputs, incremental delivery, honest reporting of technical risk.
• Systematically eliminates toil: treats anything manual in the production path as a defect and automates as a default behaviour, personally and across the team.

Technology Skills:

• (Must Have) Practical experience of designing, building and operating Red Hat OpenShift at scale in production, running both containers and virtual machines (OpenShift Virtualization / KubeVirt) across multiple regions or sites, including lifecycle and upgrade management.
• Expert-level Kubernetes internals: scheduling, resource management, RBAC and admission control, CNI networking behaviour, CSI storage, and troubleshooting at the control-plane layer (etcd, API server, ingress).
• Hosted control plane architectures (HyperShift / HCP): management vs workload cluster separation, hosted cluster lifecycle, and the operational model differences from standalone clusters.
• GitOps-based platform delivery in production: Argo CD or equivalent, declarative configuration, environment promotion, drift detection - everything-as-code as a working default.
• Multi-cluster fleet management and policy-as-code: Red Hat ACM or equivalent, Gatekeeper/OPA, placement and governance across a large cluster estate.
• Infrastructure-as-code and automation in production: Ansible and/or alternatives, plus working proficiency in at least one of Go, Python or Bash for automating platform operations.
• API-first platform design: authoring and versioning APIs consumed by other product teams, managing breaking changes and deprecation, Kubernetes API extension patterns (CRDs, operators).
• Observability engineering: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana or equivalent; defining SLIs/SLOs and designing alerting that reflects service health rather than component noise.
• Designing and operating fault-tolerant, highly available, high-throughput distributed systems, including platform integration with enterprise networking (load balancing, DNS, BGP concepts) and identity (LDAP/OIDC, certificate management).
• CKA/CKS and/or Red Hat certification (OpenShift Administration, OpenShift Virtualization, RHCE) a strong advantage.

Desirable Technology

• Large-scale VMware-to-OpenShift migration experience: MTV or equivalent tooling, and the operational realities of running a mixed VM/container estate during transition.
• Bare-metal provisioning at scale: ZTP, Metal3, host lifecycle management inside and outside the data centre.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise and software-defined storage as consumed by the platform - e.g. ODF/Ceph, SAN/NAS integration, S3-compatible object storage, CSI driver behaviour.
• Platform-level backup and DR for containerised and virtualised workloads - e.g. OADP/Velero, Veeam, or equivalent, including tested restore.

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