Head of Platform Engineering

About us

At Xelix, we work with some of the world’s largest companies to automate and strengthen their financial controls. Our AI solutions redefine how Accounts Payable teams operate – moving from manual processes to automated, intelligent workflows.

Xelix is a fast-paced scale-up – things move fast and expectations are high. We raised our Series B with Insight Partners in June 2025 and are expanding aggressively. We have a team of 150 talented people pulling together to achieve our goals. Everyone is trusted to take ownership, move fast and have a meaningful impact. We prioritise personal and professional growth, keep things fun, and love to celebrate a milestone together.

In this role you’ll grow, be challenged and help shape the future of Xelix. If you’re excited about building something special with us, we’d love to hear from you.

About the role

To prepare for a significant period of growth, Xelix is seeking a Head of Platform Engineering to own the reliability, scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness of the Xelix SaaS platform. This role provides senior technical and operational leadership to ensure our technology and processes are capable of meeting our future business needs.

This is a hands-on leadership role combining architecture, operational ownership, and team development. The role requires initiating and delivering change. Our successful candidate will be able to identify the areas where we could improve, make a proposal and see the change through. Taking responsibility, showing pride in your work and excellent communication skills are essential.

The current technology stack makes extensive use of Amazon Web Services using Terraform to configure services. We also use Jenkins, Sentry, GitHub, Shortcut, Python and React and an evolving suite of AI tools.

The Head of Platform Engineering reports to the VP of Engineering.

What you'll be doing

Platform Strategy & Architecture

• Own the long-term platform and infrastructure strategy

• Keep complex ETL and analysis pipelines operating reliably at scale (RabbitMQ, Celery, Python, Prefect, OpenTelemetry)

• Optimise systems which handle the processing of large data volumes (RDS / PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, S3)

• Design and evolve cloud architecture to support scale, resilience, and performance

• Set standards for infrastructure, CI/CD, environments, and observability

Developer Experience (DevEx)

• Provide infrastructure for the development team to code, test and deploy efficiently

• Advise engineers with picking the right solutions for projects

• Introduce and monitor relevant metrics (DORA or similar)

• Introduce tooling and practices that improve developer efficiency

AI/ML Platform Ownership

• Own the shared ML/AI platform for training and inference

• Run core ML foundations: model registry + feature store

• Build cost-efficient LLM serving (routing + caching + guardrails)

• Deliver AI observability and cost-per-customer attribution

Reliability & Operations

• Own production reliability, uptime, and incident response

• Define and enforce SLAs and SREs

• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews

• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and on-call practices are effective and sustainable

Security & Risk

• Partner closely with the Information Security Officer (ISO) on cloud security

• Support the ISO to maintain compliance standards (SOC1, SOC 2, ISO:27001)

• Own platform-level security decisions and risk mitigation

• Ensure secure-by-design infrastructure and access controls

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead and mentor the DevOps team including DevOps engineers, IT Support and an Information Security Officer

• Provide technical coaching and decision support to the DevOps team

Cost & Efficiency

• Manage relationship with AWS and other vendors

• Own cloud cost visibility and optimisation

• Balance performance, reliability, and cost trade-offs

What you’ll bring

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certificate or equivalent AWS experience

• Record of introducing best practice processes in a fast growing SaaS business, e.g.:

  • FinOps measures and cost control

  • Incident handling, including OOH support

  • Achieving 99.9% SLAs

  • Defining and adhering to SLEs

• Demonstrated success with scaling enterprise SaaS systems

• Ability to operate production systems under pressure

• Strong background in reliability, observability, and incident management

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers

What we offer in return

Competitive salary depending on experience

️ 27 days of annual leave (including 3 days Christmas closing) which increases up to 3 days based on tenure, with the option to roll over, buy or sell up to 3 days

Hybrid working with one day a week from our dog-friendly Hoxton office

On-site gym and cycle to work scheme

️ Employee discount at over 100 retailers

Comprehensive private medical & dental cover with Vitality

Enhanced parental leave pay

Learning & development culture – £1,000 personal annual budget

We’re carbon-neutral and are working towards ambitious carbon reduction goals

Lots of team socials & activities

☀️ Annual team retreat

Want to learn more?

We believe that people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences make our company and product better. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you! And if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!

If you're a recruiting agency - we have an existing list of agencies we work with and we are not currently planning on expanding the list. Neither the Talent team nor hiring managers or the Support team will respond to cold outreach.

This is a full-time position, with standard working hours from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

Interview Process
While the exact process may vary slightly depending on the role, our typical interview stages are:

1. Introductory Call – A short Teams conversation with a Talent Partner to discuss your background and the opportunity.

2. Hiring Manager Interview – A 30–45 minute Teams meeting to explore your experience and fit for the team.

3. Technical Task or Presentation – A role-relevant exercise to demonstrate your skills and approach.

4. Final On-site Interview – An in-person meeting with our senior leadership team and co-founders at our office.

We strive to make the process clear, efficient, and respectful of your time.