Director of Platform Engineering

This senior technical leadership role is responsible for the long-term technological vision, development, and evolution of SailGP's digital and data ecosystem. It oversees the production software powering the digital estate, including SailGP.com, the SailGP App/Headsets, SailGP Insights, SailGP Media Portal, Fan Simulator, and betting applications, as well as the entire technology stack supporting these products. The role bridges business strategy and technical execution by partnering with executive leadership across the Digital and Technology teams.

• Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-performing, multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and engineering excellence.
• Define and execute the long-term technical roadmap and architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with SailGP's commercial and digital business objectives.
• Act as a strategic partner to the Group Technology Director to prioritise initiatives and translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Oversee the software engineering budget, evaluate third-party technologies, and manage relationships with external development agencies and SaaS vendors.
• Collaborate with the Director of Performance Engineering and Director of Liveline to ensure the end-to-end data pipeline is fit for purpose.
• Guide architectural decisions and establish technical standards across the organisation, ensuring scalability, security, and high availability for platforms including SailGP.com, the SailGP App/Headsets, Fan Simulator, and SailGP Insights.
• Oversee the maintenance and evolution of production software, implementing AI-first software engineering best practice, including agile methodologies, unit testing, refactoring, code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Direct technical strategies for concurrency, profiling, and performance optimisation in high-traffic, live-event environments, and ensure platforms adhere to foundational and technical SEO principles.
• Lead the evaluation and implementation of day-to-day AI automation tools to improve development workflows, content delivery, and user experiences.
• Champion strong UX design principles, integrate complex front-end code dependencies, apply expertise in enterprise headless CMS platforms such as Contentful to create flexible, omnichannel content delivery architectures
• And maintain the team's ability to rapidly prototype new features and proofs of concept.

• Strong blend of strategic foresight, people leadership, and deep understanding of advanced engineering practices.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a Director or Senior Engineering Management role overseeing multi-disciplinary teams.
• Deep foundational expertise in common front-end technologies and architecture, with the ability to dive into the code for high-level troubleshooting and code reviews.
• Expertise in architecting cloud-native infrastructure, leveraging SQL and time-series databases to ensure system reliability and performance at scale.
• Proven track record of leading teams to build and scale distributed architectures that handle massive datasets, focusing on low-latency processing and efficient data governance.
• Proven track record of scaling enterprise-grade AI infrastructure and software development practices to ensure modern and efficient ways of working.
• Proven track record of designing, scaling, and maintaining high-traffic consumer-facing applications and production environments.
• Deep experience designing architecture around headless or decoupled content platforms, such as Contentful.
• Strong ability to connect engineering output to business ROI, balancing technical debt with the need for speed-to-market.
• Strong understanding and experience of UX design.
• Exceptional executive-level communication skills, capable of confidently translating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and C-suite executives.
• A visionary leader who is self-motivated and capable of working autonomously, while actively empowering and trusting their team.
• Thrives in a fast-paced, high-pressure, live-event sports environment and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
• Calm, decisive, and highly effective under pressure.

• Hybrid working model with a minimum of three days per week in the London office.
• Occasional travel to global events may be required.