Platform Product Lead

Salary: £25,000 - 65,000 per year

Requirements:

• Substantial hands-on experience running production Kubernetes, ideally on Google Cloud/GKE, managing business-critical estates.
• Deep practical fluency in Terraform/OpenTofu and FluxCD/Argo CD.
• Ability to manage and own a platform as a product, including roadmaps, adoption metrics, and service levels.
• Strong cloud FinOps experience.
• Experience with vendor negotiation.
• Ability to articulate technical debt and costs to executives.
• Decisive, customer-focused, pragmatic, curious, and collaborative approach.
• Comfortable working in a hands-on role that combines product management and engineering.
• Experience leading technical direction and modernisation programmes.
• Experience managing key vendor relationships and supporting team growth.

Responsibilities:

• Own our GCP/GKE cloud runtime, integration and API gateway, Kafka event backbone, and identity/security platform with published roadmaps and service levels.
• Lead the management of our Gemini agent platform, with access to Anthropic models, including reusable patterns and governance to help teams ship AI safely and quickly.
• Write and review IaC using OpenTofu/Terraform, Helm, FluxCD, and CI pipelines.
• Build with AI directly to test standards first-hand.
• Own cloud costs as a platform outcome, including attribution of spend, patch currency, availability scorecards, and end-of-life exposure.
• Act as the accountable decision-maker across architecture and design reviews.
• Drive in-flight modernisation programmes.
• Manage key vendor relationships including Google Cloud, Confluent, Tyk, and Datadog.
• Grow our platform engineering team with SRE, DevSecOps, and agent engineering depth.

Technologies:

• AI
• API
• Backbone
• Cloud
• Datadog
• DevSecOps
• GCP
• Hardware
• Helm
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Network
• PLC
• Security
• Terraform
• DevOps
• GitOps
• Product Manager

More:

We are Toolstation, one of the UKs leading multi-channel retailers of trade tools, building supplies, and hardware, serving professional tradespeople and home improvers. We operate as part of the Travis Perkins plc group and have a network of almost 600 stores, focused on low prices, quick convenience, and reliable product availability. This is a permanent, full-time hybrid role based close to Northampton or Bridgwater, with 40 hours per week. We offer a competitive salary, bonus and benefits package, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, a competitive bonus scheme, company pension scheme and life assurance, 20% discounts across all Travis Perkins companies, recognition awards, discounts at over 1000 other retailers, and ongoing training and development with opportunities to grow your career across the business.

last updated 35 week of 2026