Head of Platform & Security

Job Purposes: As Head of Platform & Security, you will lead and shape the strategic direction of our platform, building, scaling, and running a world-class cloud infrastructure. You will own the full platform engineering function, bring modern engineering, CD, developer experience and autonomy to all, and you become a strong and vocal leader for all our engineering teams. You will own the security function. Your team will actively follow security best practices and topics, and own the security backlog for our organization. You will be supported and be an an active contributor to Central Group CISO community. Responsibilities: Lead and grow a high-performing Platform & Security team, setting the vision, culture, and technical direction Own the design, delivery, and evolution of highly available, flexible, secure and cheap infrastructure at scale Enable great developer experience, leveraging trunk-based and continuous delivery pipeline to enable product engineering teams autonomy Leverage extensive automation to embed standards, security and operational excellence into every stage of the development lifecycle Drive a DevSecOps culture where reliability, availability, security are shared responsibilities for all team members Stay actively engaged with security topics day to day — following the threat landscape, reviewing approaches, and remaining hands-on enough to guide the team and make sound technical decisions Build and embed security fundamentals across The 1 Platform, developing and continuously improving generalisable approaches to authorization, authentication, abuse detection, abuse prevention, and auditing Lead platform and product security incident response, ensuring timely detection, escalation, and resolution of security events Oversee security auditing practices for platform infrastructure, ensuring compliance with internal policies and relevant regulatory requirements Establish and govern reusable platform standards, golden paths, and self-service capabilities that accelerate product delivery Define and own the platform and security roadmap, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term scalability, reliability, security, and cost sustainability Serve as the executive-level technical authority for cloud, Kubernetes, CD, security, and shared infrastructure services Act as a trusted technical advisor and strategic partner to engineering, product, finance, compliance, and executive stakeholders Proactively identify and mitigate scaling, reliability, security, and cost risks before they impact customers Own and drive the organization's FinOps strategy, ensuring effective cloud cost governance and optimization across compute, storage, networking workloads Establish cost visibility, attribution, and accountability frameworks across engineering teams Recruit, develop, and retain senior platform and security engineering talent; build a coaching and mentorship culture within the team Define and report on engineering, security, and operational metrics, communicating platform health, progress, and investment trade-offs to senior leadership Watch your leadership impact a rapidly growing company and the lives of our customers Qualifications: Deep expertise in AWS/GCP, CD Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, API gateways Demonstrated experience leading and scaling platform, security, engineering teams Enthusiast to collaborate with all engineers towards excellence as a team Proven track record of securing cloud environments, API gateways, and platform services at scale, including abuse detection, penetration testing Strong knowledge of network infrastructure and cloud security architecture Treats git as the source of truth for everything — infrastructure, configuration, and policy Holds a BS/BA degree in computer science or a relevant field Has at least 8 years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or DevSecOps/security engineering, with 3+ years in a senior leadership role Strong command of computer science fundamentals and distributed systems principles Passionate about reliability, performance, security, and building platforms that others love to use An exceptional leader and communicator who can inspire engineers, influence executives, and build alignment across diverse stakeholders — from design to compliance Operates with high autonomy and sound judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments Thinks at the system, organizational, and business-impact level — not just at the component or team level Brings a product mindset to platform engineering — focused on developer experience, internal adoption, and measurable business outcomes