VP Engineering and Reliability

Define and drive the modernisation path for the Oracle estate — consolidation, re-platforming, migration to managed or cloud-native services — with a clear, staged, risk-managed plan.

2 CI/CD and delivery engineering

Own the continuous integration and continuous delivery platform end to end: source control strategy, build systems, artefact management, pipeline orchestration, environment management and release automation.

Drive measurable improvement in DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate and mean time to restore — across all consuming product teams.

Embed secure software supply chain practice: dependency and artefact provenance, SBOM generation, signing, secrets management and policy gates in pipeline.

Treat internal developer experience as a product: define the golden paths, measure adoption and satisfaction, and reduce the cognitive load on product engineers.

3 Infrastructure provisioning

Own infrastructure-as-code standards, modules and pipelines across the cloud estate and remaining on-premise/private-cloud footprint.

Deliver self-service, policy-governed provisioning so product teams obtain compliant environments in minutes rather than weeks.

Enforce guardrails covering security posture, network segmentation, tagging, resilience tiers and cost controls; implement drift detection and automated remediation.

Own FinOps for the platform estate: forecasting, showback/chargeback, commitment management and a continuous cost-optimisation programme.

Ensure capacity, resilience and disaster recovery designs meet the business’s stated RTO/RPO commitments, and prove them through regular exercise.

4 Oracle Database Engineering

Own the engineering, automation and lifecycle of the Oracle estate: Oracle Database on virtual machines, Exadata (on-premise, Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service), RAC, Data Guard, ASM, Grid Infrastructure, RMAN and related tooling.

Set standards for provisioning, patching, upgrade, backup/recovery, cloning and refresh — automated and repeatable, not manually executed.

Drive database performance engineering: workload analysis, AWR/ASH-based diagnostics, SQL and schema optimisation, and capacity planning for Exadata resources.

Ensure high availability and data protection across the estate, including tested recovery and failover procedures for tier-one services.

Manage Oracle licensing exposure and cost in conjunction with Procurement and Legal; maintain a defensible position on licence compliance.

Lead the modernisation agenda — rationalisation, migration to Oracle cloud services or alternative engines where justified — with explicit cost, risk and benefit cases.

Partner with application engineering to raise database engineering competence in product teams and reduce reliance on specialist intervention.

5 People and organizational leadership

Lead, coach and develop a leadership layer of directors and senior managers across multiple locations and time zones.

Attract, hire and retain senior engineering talent in a competitive market; build succession depth for critical roles.

Set clear performance expectations, career frameworks and progression paths; address underperformance directly and fairly.

Build an engineering culture characterised by ownership, operational rigour, psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Manage the departmental budget covering headcount, tooling, licences and infrastructure consumption.

6 Governance, risk and stakeholder management

Ensure platform services meet regulatory, security and audit obligations [e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, sector-specific requirements] in conjunction with the organizations “Trust & Intelligence” function

Represent Engineering & Reliability at executive and board-level forums; translate technical risk into commercial language.

Manage strategic vendor relationships — cloud providers, Oracle, observability and tooling vendors — including commercial negotiation and performance management.

Partner effectively with Product, Security, Architecture, Operations and Customer Success on shared outcomes.

Essential Experience

• Substantial engineering leadership experience at Senior Director or VP level, including leading leaders, in an organisation of comparable or greater technical complexity.
• Proven accountability for a platform or infrastructure engineering organisation of 40+ engineers across multiple locations.
• Deep, credible experience across at least three of the domains:

• CI/CD and release engineering at scale
• Cloud infrastructure provisioning and infrastructure-as-code
• Oracle database engineering, including Exadata and Oracle on VMs

• Track record of running large-scale Oracle estates in production — RAC, Data Guard, Exadata — and of modernising or migrating them without disrupting the business.
• Demonstrated delivery of cloud-first transformation while continuing to operate significant legacy or specialised infrastructure.
• Experience defining and operating an SRE model: SLOs, error budgets, incident command and post-incident learning.
• Strong commercial capability — budget ownership, vendor negotiation, FinOps and Oracle licensing awareness.
• Experience in a regulated or high-availability environment where downtime carries material commercial or reputational cost.
• Evidence of building high-performing teams: hiring senior talent, developing leaders, and improving retention and engagement

Desirable Experience

Background in enterprise software, SaaS or a product organisation serving business-critical customer workloads.

Hands-on familiarity with [Azure / AWS / OCI], Kubernetes, Terraform, and a mainstream observability stack [Datadog / Grafana / Dynatrace / Elastic].

Experience of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service.

Experience integrating engineering organisations following acquisition.

Relevant degree in Computer Science or Engineering; relevant cloud or Oracle certifications.

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