Head of Cloud Platform Engineering
Senior leadership role leading Totara Learning's cloud platform engineering, unifying distributed infrastructure teams to run its learning SaaS as thousands of dedicated, isolated AWS deployments. Day to day: setting operating standards, SRE/observability practices, FinOps, and driving migration to a continuously delivered, multi-cloud platform (AWS, Terraform/IaC, containers).
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Devops
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Leading platform or infrastructure engineering within a growing B2B SaaS business
- Deep hands-on AWS expertise across infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), containers, orchestration, networking, and cloud security
- Experience designing and operating dedicated customer or cell-based deployment models, with understanding of isolation, resilience, and operational economics
- Strong Site Reliability Engineering mindset: service levels, incident management, observability, operational excellence
- Practical FinOps experience with a track record of improving cloud cost efficiency
- Leading and growing distributed engineering teams across multiple locations, including teams following organisational change or acquisition
- Experience working within regulated industries where security, compliance, and governance are fundamental design considerations
- Real-world experience delivering multi-cloud platforms, with judgement about when portability adds value
Nice to have
- Experience transitioning products from hosted or self-managed deployments to fully managed SaaS
- Experience building platforms or ecosystems that enable partners or third parties to extend products
- Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, or similar
Full description
Totara is a global learning platform trusted by more than 1,500 organisations and 21 million users worldwide. We help organisations build workforce readiness through flexible learning, compliance, and talent development solutions designed for complex and highly regulated environments across both the public and private sectors.
We're at an exciting point in our journey. As we continue to evolve our platform and expand our SaaS offering, we're investing in the engineering foundations that will support the next phase of our growth.
About the role
This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Totara's cloud platform.
Historically, our software has been released annually and deployed in a variety of ways by both Totara and our partners. Today, we're evolving towards operating our platform as a modern SaaS service: continuously delivered, consistently operated, and available wherever our customers need us around the world.
We're clear on where we're heading, but how we get there is still being built. As Head of Cloud Platform Engineering, you'll play a central role in defining that journey.
Today our infrastructure capability spans multiple teams, regions, and platforms, including environments inherited through acquisition. These teams have built valuable expertise, and your role will be to bring them together behind a shared operating model, common engineering standards, and a platform that enables our product teams to move faster with confidence.
You'll lead the teams responsible for how we provision, deploy, operate, observe, secure, and optimise the infrastructure that supports our global customer base.
Unlike many SaaS businesses, our customers run on dedicated deployments rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure. Operating thousands of isolated environments efficiently, securely, and economically is one of the most interesting challenges this role will tackle.
Today we're primarily AWS-based, with multi-cloud capability becoming an important next step. Our customers include governments and highly regulated organisations with specific regional, sovereignty, and compliance requirements, so expanding our cloud footprint is driven by genuine customer need rather than technology for technology's sake.
**What you'll be responsible for:
Bringing teams together**
- Build a unified operating model across our infrastructure and cloud engineering teams.
- Establish shared engineering standards, on-call practices, and ways of working.
- Champion engineering excellence across infrastructure as code, peer review, operational readiness, and change management.
- Build, coach, and develop a high-performing distributed team.