Director of Platform Operations

Location: Remote

Salary: £150,000 - £160,000

At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.
We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn't mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.
Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.
At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren't just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

We are looking for an experienced and highly knowledgeable Platform Operations Director to join our Engineering team and to own the operational backbone of Arbor's suite of applications. The remit and focus of the role is to bring together three distinct disciplines - Site Reliability Engineering, Security Engineering, and Developer Experience - under single accountable leadership, and be responsible for their outcomes across every product line and market.

It's a broad and exciting role, so we're looking for someone up for a challenge - if you're an effective leader and are highly collaborative, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

Site Reliability Engineering and availability

• Own the availability commitment. Be accountable for meeting the 99.9% availability SLA across the application suite. Define, publish, and govern the SLO and error-budget framework that makes availability measurable, forecastable, and actionable rather than retrospective.
• Build the reliability discipline. Lead the SRE pillar to embed observability, capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and toil reduction as standing practices with clear owners and cadence.
• Make reliability visible. Ensure availability, latency, and error-budget consumption are reported transparently to product teams, R&D leadership, and the executive, with credible attribution of loss to cause.
• Engineer out recurrence. Drive systemic reliability improvement through problem management, tracking repeat causes, single points of failure, and architectural weak points to closure with named owners and dates.

Security engineering and vulnerability management

• Own the vulnerability management framework. Define and operate the end-to-end framework for identifying, triaging, prioritising, and remediating security vulnerabilities across application code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure, including agreed severity definitions and remediation SLAs.
• Put the reporting in place. Build the reporting and dashboards that allow the organisation - R&D leadership, the executive, and where relevant the board and customers - to monitor vulnerability burn-down and resolution against SLA, by severity, age, and owning team.
• Hold the line on remediation. Ensure vulnerabilities are resolved rather than merely recorded: drive burn-down of the existing backlog, prevent ageing, and elevate credibly where remediation is not being prioritised.
• Shift security left. Embed security into the engineering workflow through automated scanning, secure-by-default platform patterns, dependency hygiene, and practical enablement for product teams. Partner closely with security leadership and the CISO on posture, roadmap, compliance obligations, and audit evidence.

Developer Experience and the build-it, run-it transformation

• Lead the…