Director, Apac Head Of Platform Services (Job Id: 10077880)

We are seeking an accomplished and strategically minded Platforms Lead to head our infrastructure and platform engineering function. This is a senior leadership role within our Technology division, operating at the heart of a regulated financial services environment where resilience, security, and operational excellence are paramount. The Platforms Lead will be accountable for the end-to-end delivery and operational integrity of our hosting infrastructure, virtualisation platforms, Windows and Linux server estates, cloud environments (AWS and Azure), observability tooling, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. The successful candidate will bring both deep technical knowledge and the strategic vision to evolve our platforms in alignment with business objectives and regulatory obligations. Key Responsibilities Platform Strategy & Leadership Define and execute the long-term technology roadmap for all platform domains including hosting, virtualisation, cloud, and observability. Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of platform and infrastructure engineers. Act as the senior technical authority for infrastructure decisions, architectural standards, and platform governance. Partner with senior stakeholders across Technology, Risk, Compliance, and the Business to align platform capabilities with organisational goals. Hosting & Virtualisation Oversee the management and evolution of on-premises hosting environments and data centre operations. Drive the strategy and lifecycle management of virtualisation platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, or equivalent). Ensure platform capacity planning, performance management, and availability targets are consistently met. Windows & Linux Infrastructure Maintain accountability for enterprise-grade Windows Server and Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu, or equivalent) environments. Enforce OS hardening standards, patching cadences, and configuration management practices in line with security and regulatory requirements. Champion automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) across server provisioning and configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or equivalent). Cloud Operations (AWS & Azure) Lead cloud operations across AWS and Azure, ensuring environments are secure, well-architected, cost-optimised, and compliant. Drive cloud adoption strategies including migration initiatives, cloud-native service integration, and hybrid cloud design. Establish and enforce cloud governance frameworks, tagging policies, cost management disciplines, and identity & access controls. Maintain awareness of cloud service evolution and assess applicability of new services to the organisation's platform strategy. Observability & SRE Define and embed an observability-first culture, establishing standards for logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting across all platform layers. Lead the adoption and maturation of SRE practices including SLO/SLA definition, error budgets, reliability reviews, and blameless post-incident processes. Drive implementation and continuous improvement of monitoring tooling (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent). Champion proactive capacity management, performance engineering, and chaos engineering to improve platform resilience. Risk, Control & Compliance Maintain a strong risk and control framework across all platform domains, ensuring adherence to internal policies and external regulatory requirements (e.g. FCA, PRA, or equivalent). Engage proactively with Internal Audit, Risk, and Compliance functions to evidence platform controls and address findings in a timely manner. Ensure robust disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BCP) capabilities are designed, tested, and maintained. Manage third-party and vendor risk for all platform-related suppliers, including contract performance and SLA oversight. Job Requirements Minimum of 10 years of progressive technology leadership experience, with at least 5 years in a senior management or lead capacity. Proven experience in delivering platforms leadership within a regulated financial services environment (banking, asset management, insurance, payments, or similar). Demonstrated expertise across hosting infrastructure, virtualization, Windows and Linux platforms, as well as AWS and Azure cloud environments. Familiar with middleware and Database Demonstrable experience leading SRE or platform reliability functions and embedding observability tooling at scale. Strong people leadership skills with experienc…