Director of Platform Engineering

Location: Warsaw-hybrid Type of contract: UoP

As Director of Engineering for Kyriba's future Base Platform Infrastructure, you will be responsible for setting the strategic technical direction and leading engineering execution of the foundational platform that underpins Kyriba's product strategy and roadmap. This encompasses the Kubernetes platform, networking, persistence, and middleware technologies that Kyriba's engineering teams rely on to build and operate its products. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role. You will set the strategic direction for the base platform, own the technical decisions that define its reliability, scalability, and security, and lead a team of talented Platform and Software Engineers to build and operate it at enterprise scale. You will be the most senior technical voice for the base platform and are expected to lead from the front - designing solutions, reviewing code, and raising the engineering bar across the team. You will work closely with peer engineering leaders across R&D, and with Product and Program Management counterparts, but your primary accountability is to the quality, reliability, and evolution of the platform itself.

Technical Leadership and Strategic Direction

Define and own the strategic technical direction of the base platform, making principled decisions on platform design, tooling selection, and engineering patterns.

Define and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and quality gates across the infrastructure codebase.

Lead the design and implementation of core platform components including Kubernetes cluster configuration, network topology, storage and persistence layers, and middleware systems.

Drive the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices across the team, ensuring the platform is fully automated, reproducible, and auditable.

Evaluate emerging technologies and approaches, and make evidence-based recommendations on when and how to adopt them.

Ensure the platform is built for resilience, observability, and operability from the outset, with security embedded by design.

Platform Reliability and Operational Excellence

Own the reliability, performance, and security posture of the base platform end-to-end.

Define and uphold SLOs and SLIs for the platform, and lead the team in continuously improving platform health.

Drive a strong incident management and on-call culture, ensuring the team can respond to and learn from production issues effectively.

Ensure platform changes are delivered safely through robust CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and progressive rollout strategies.

Champion observability across the platform - ensuring logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting are first-class engineering concerns.

Technical Communication and Cross-Functional Collaboration

Clearly articulate technical strategy, engineering decisions, and trade-offs to both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders.

Collaborate with peer engineering leaders across R&D to ensure the base platform meets the needs of the teams building on top of it.

Engage with Product and Program Management to provide honest, accurate technical input on feasibility, complexity, and delivery confidence - without being driven by programme pressure at the expense of engineering quality.

Proactively surface technical risks and platform limitations early, with well-reasoned proposals for how to address them

Required Qualifications and Expertise

A Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree is essential, preferably in a technical discipline such as Information Technology (IT), Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related quantitative field. Technical Acumen (Cloud and DevOps):

Proven Hands-On Engineering Experience within a Cloud Environment: The candidate must demonstrate substantive, deep engineering experience designing and operating cloud-native or cloud-migrated platforms. This includes direct ownership of operational, security, reliability, and cost engineering aspects of cloud infrastructure.

Expert Knowledge of Modern Cloud Technologies: This is a core requirement and demands more than theoretical familiarity. The ideal candidate must have deep, hands-on expertise across a modern cloud-native stack, including:

Container Orchestration: Expert-level Kubernetes engineering experience is mandatory, including cluster architecture, ecosystem tooling, deployment patterns, autoscaling, and operational reliability at scale.

Cloud Providers: Strong hands-on engineering experience with major public cloud platforms (AWS is preferred; Azure/GCP are not blockers) and their core services (compute, storage, networking, database).

DevOps and Automation: A deep command of GitOps principles and toolchains for continuous deployment and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), with practical experience leveraging tools such as Git, Terraform, and CI/CD pipeline frameworks.

Essential Leadership and Communication Skills

Communication and Stakeholder Management

Strong Decision-Making and Technical Communication Skills: The Director of Engineering must be adept at making high-impact, data-driven technical decisions swiftly, communicating them clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and mediating technical disagreements constructively, even under ambiguity and pressure. Execution and Organisational Capability:

The Capacity to Lead Effectively in a Fast-Paced Setting while Balancing Multiple Competing Technical Priorities: The environment is dynamic and requires an engineering leader who is resilient, adaptable, and capable of maintaining technical rigour and strategic focus simultaneously. The candidate must be able to triage and prioritise a high volume of concurrent engineering challenges to ensure critical platform milestones are delivered on time, to the required quality, and within scope.