VP Engineering and Reliability

To lead the engineering & reliability function within the “Technology Platform” organization responsible for the systems that other engineers build on: continuous delivery, automated infrastructure provisioning, database and performance engineering.  

The VP is accountable for the reliability, security, performance and cost of these platforms, for the engineering standards applied across them, and for building a high-calibre, globally distributed leadership team.

Key areas of responsibility 

1 Strategy and technical leadership 

• Own and communicate a multi-year technical strategy for CI/CD, provisioning, database engineering and observability, aligned to the wider cloud-first roadmap. 

• Set the architecture and engineering standards for platform services; act as the senior technical authority and design-review escalation point. 

• Build the business case for platform investment, including build-versus-buy decisions on tooling, and secure funding through the annual planning cycle. 

• Define and drive the modernisation path for the Oracle estate — consolidation, re-platforming, migration to managed or cloud-native services — with a clear, staged, risk-managed plan. 

2 CI/CD and delivery engineering 

• Own the continuous integration and continuous delivery platform end to end: source control strategy, build systems, artefact management, pipeline orchestration, environment management and release automation. 

• Drive measurable improvement in DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate and mean time to restore — across all consuming product teams. 

• Embed secure software supply chain practice: dependency and artefact provenance, SBOM generation, signing, secrets management and policy gates in pipeline. 

• Treat internal developer experience as a product: define the golden paths, measure adoption and satisfaction, and reduce the cognitive load on product engineers. 

3 Infrastructure provisioning 

• Own infrastructure-as-code standards, modules and pipelines across the cloud estate and remaining on-premise/private-cloud footprint. 

• Deliver self-service, policy-governed provisioning so product teams obtain compliant environments in minutes rather than weeks. 

• Enforce guardrails covering security posture, network segmentation, tagging, resilience tiers and cost controls; implement drift detection and automated remediation. 

• Own FinOps for the platform estate: forecasting, showback/chargeback, commitment management and a continuous cost-optimisation programme. 

• Ensure capacity, resilience and disaster recovery designs meet the business’s stated RTO/RPO commitments, and prove them through regular exercise. 

4 Oracle Database Engineering 

• Own the engineering, automation and lifecycle of the Oracle estate: Oracle Database on virtual machines, Exadata (on-premise, Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service), RAC, Data Guard, ASM, Grid Infrastructure, RMAN and related tooling. 

• Set standards for provisioning, patching, upgrade, backup/recovery, cloning and refresh — automated and repeatable, not manually executed. 

• Drive database performance engineering: workload analysis, AWR/ASH-based diagnostics, SQL and schema optimisation, and capacity planning for Exadata resources. 

• Ensure high availability and data protection across the estate, including tested recovery and failover procedures for tier-one services. 

• Manage Oracle licensing exposure and cost in conjunction with Procurement and Legal; maintain a defensible position on licence compliance. 

• Lead the modernisation agenda — rationalisation, migration to Oracle cloud services or alternative engines where justified — with explicit cost, risk and benefit cases. 

• Partner with application engineering to raise database engineering competence in product teams and reduce reliance on specialist intervention. 

5 People and organizational leadership 

• Lead, coach and develop a leadership layer of directors and senior managers across multiple locations and time zones. 

• Attract, hire and retain senior engineering talent in a competitive market; build succession depth for critical roles. 

• Set clear performance expectations, career frameworks and progression paths; address underperformance directly and fairly. 

• Build an engineering culture characterised by ownership, operational rigour, psychological safety and continuous improvement. 

• Manage the departmental budget covering headcount, tooling, licences and infrastructure consumption. 

6 Governance, risk and stakeholder management 

• Ensure platform services meet regulatory, security and audit obligations [e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, sector-specific requirements] in conjunction with the organizations “Trust & Intelligence” function 

• Represent Engineering & Reliability at executive and board-level forums; translate technical risk into commercial language. 

• Manage strategic vendor relationships — cloud providers, Oracle, observability and tooling vendors — including commercial negotiation and performance management. 

• Partner effectively with Product, Security, Architecture, Operations and Customer Success on shared outcomes.

Department: Research and Development
Function: Research
Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level