Platform Engineering Manager

About Us

At Travel Counsellors, our customers, communities, and colleagues are at the heart of everything we do, and this is what sets us apart. We prioritise relationships over transactions, connecting deeply with our customers through the moments that matter. For over 30 years, we’ve been changing lives as the UK’s leading travel marketplace for self-employed travel entrepreneurs, empowering over 2,000 independent agents to build successful leisure and corporate travel businesses.

With the support of a talented team of 400+ people in our Support Offices, our Travel Counsellors create exceptional experiences and build lasting personal connections, ensuring customers return time and time again. Our unique approach has earned us numerous accolades, including "Best Place to Work in Travel" at the 2022 TTG Travel Industry Awards, a spot on the Sunday Times Best Places to Work list (2023-2024), and the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation.

As we experience exceptional growth, with record revenues exceeding £1bn, we’re looking for outstanding individuals to join our expanding Head Office team and help us continue to thrive.

Role Description

The Platform Engineering Manager is a strategic technical and people leadership role responsible for overseeing the development, governance, security, and operational excellence of Travel Counsellors' global platform infrastructure. This role integrates DevOps, platform engineering, and infrastructure management to deliver scalable, secure, and highly available platforms that empower engineering teams.
Reporting to the Head of Platform Operations, the Platform Manager leads a multi-functional team of Platform Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Database Administrators (DBAs) to enable a high-performing, cloud-first environment. This role is pivotal in driving developer self-service capabilities, cloud-native adoption, and operational resilience while ensuring compliance with security and governance standards.
With a strong focus on leadership, strategic direction, and governance, the Platform Engineering Manager will define the future roadmap for platform services, ensuring alignment with business objectives and engineering needs.

Principal Accountabilities

Platform Strategy & Governance

• Define and implement a self-service infrastructure approach for software development teams.
• Oversee CI/CD governance, ensuring reliable, automated software deployments while reducing operational overhead.
• Set standards for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) governance, ensuring consistency and compliance.
• Drive platform engineering transformation to support scalability and resilience.
• Establish and enforce operational KPIs, SLAs, and OLAs.

Cloud & Infrastructure Leadership

• Lead the transformation from traditional infrastructure to cloud-native, platform-driven operations.
• Provide strategic direction for hybrid, multi-cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, on-premises).
• Define cloud security and compliance best practices (e.g., zero-trust architecture, automated security scanning, policy-as-code).
• Oversee disaster recovery, backup, and high-availability strategies.
• Ensure cost optimisation and efficiency in platform services.

Security, Compliance & Risk Management

• Ensure platform security aligns with ISO 27001, NIST, and GDPR compliance.
• Embed security-first principles into platform governance and DevOps processes.
• Enhance Identity & Access Management (IAM), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Conditional Access policies.
• Oversee compliance with audit requirements, regulatory standards, and risk mitigation strategies.

Leadership, Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Lead and mentor a team of Platform Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and a DBAs.
• Partner with Software Engineering, Data, Security, and Tech Ops teams to ensure a frictionless development experience.
• Foster a DevOps culture by driving collaboration between infrastructure, security, and engineering.
• Champion a continuous improvement mindset, promoting SRE best practices, SLIs/SLOs, and automation.
• Provide thought leadership and platform strategy direction to senior stakeholders.

Operational Excellence & Automation Strategy

• Drive automation-first principles to eliminate manual tasks and improve operational efficiency.
• Implement observability and monitoring frameworks to ensure platform reliability.
• Define AI-driven observability and automated issue resolution strategies.
• Oversee incident response and resilience engineering to improve platform uptime.

Our Benefits

Working here at Travel Counsellors, we value the hard work and effort that our colleagues put in. Because of this, you can expect a wide range of employee benefits including:

• A competitive basic salary + annual company bonus
• Flexible hybrid working model
• Career development and promotional opportunities
• 25 days holidays (increasing to 28 after 5 years of service)
• A Moments That Matter day (annually)
• Enhanced Maternity / Paternity pay
• Holiday buy and sell (up to 5 days per year)
• 1 paid day charity leave per year
• Company events, socials, and incentives
• 3x annual salary death in service benefit
• Company Pension scheme
• Costco Membership
• Salary sacrifice, company car scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Free breakfast, fruit, and hot/cold beverages
• Referral scheme
• Employee discount
• Private Medical Insurance (taxable benefit) or Healthcare Cash Plan (costs incurred by employees)