Platform Technical Lead

Job Description

Who we are

VOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) is a strategic arm of Vodafone Group Plc, creating value for customers by delivering intelligent solutions through Talent, Technology & Transformation.
As the largest shared services organisation in the global telco industry with 30,000 FTE, our portfolio of next-generation solutions and services are designed in partnership with customers across Vodafone Group, local markets, and partner markets to simplify and drive growth. With our strategic partner Accenture, we work alongside our Vodafone customers, other Telco and tech companies to drive transformation, meet the challenges of our industry and ensure we stay relevant and resilient. This partnership is a unique, industry-first model which brings together the best of in-house and 3rd party capability.
We work with customers across 28 countries from 10 VOIS locations: Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Romania, Spain, Turkey, UK, Germany, Ireland, and with a network of teams in Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.
#VOIS #BeUnrivalled #CreateTheFuture

About this Role

Location: Paddington or Newbury

The Digital & IT Platform Team is responsible for designing, building, and operating the core digital and IT capabilities that support Vodafone’s enterprise platforms. The team provides cloud‑native engineering foundations, reusable enablers, and secure platform services that enable rapid, scalable delivery across multiple business initiatives. Joining Digital & IT means working within a complex enterprise technology landscape, contributing to platforms that underpin Vodafone’s long‑term digital strategy.

The Value Streams Engineering Team delivers end‑to‑end digital experiences and platform capabilities through cross‑functional, product‑centric squads. Each squad is empowered to own and deliver a defined area of business value, using modern engineering practices and cloud‑native tooling. Joining this team means building high‑quality digital solutions at pace, directly shaping how internal and external users interact with Vodafone’s Digital & IT platforms.

The Platform Technical Lead is a senior technical authority within the Digital & IT organisation, responsible for driving engineering excellence, shaping technical execution, and guiding multiple squads in delivering high‑quality, cloud‑native platform capabilities. This role translates architectural direction into practical technical implementation, ensures teams follow best‑practice engineering patterns, and provides hands‑on leadership across backend services, APIs, integrations, and shared platform components.

Operating across Digital & IT, Networks, Product, Security, and Platform Engineering teams, the Platform Technical Lead ensures coherent engineering delivery, accelerates the adoption of modern engineering practices, and supports the development of secure, scalable, enterprise‑grade Digital & IT platforms.

Given the responsibilities outlined above, the role includes:

• Providing technical leadership and hands‑on guidance across multiple squads (40–70+ FTE influence), ensuring consistent engineering standards, design patterns, and high‑quality implementation across the Digital & IT platform.
• Informing and influencing multi‑million‑euro engineering investment decisions, including tooling, automation, infrastructure, and technical capability uplift across the delivery organisation.
• Mentoring and enabling senior engineers, Technical Leads, and DevOps specialists, championing modern engineering practices such as CI/CD, automation, observability, reliability, secure‑by‑design, and event‑driven architectures.
• Driving cross‑organisational technical forums, resolving major engineering risks, and ensuring strong alignment with architectural guardrails and platform evolution roadmaps.

What you'll do

• Provide expert technical oversight across backend services, integration flows, APIs, data models, and event‑driven platform components.
• Translate architectural blueprints and patterns into detailed engineering designs that squads can implement efficiently and securely.
• Develop, standardise, and govern coding practices, engineering design patterns, testing approaches, operational readiness, and automation frameworks.
• Lead complex technical investigations and decisions - balancing innovation, cost, performance, and delivery speed across multi‑market requirements.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Delivery Leads, Architects, and Network teams to ensure technical feasibility, sequencing, and readiness of engineering deliverables.
• Drive technical excellence in CI/CD, observability, cloud operations, performance engineering, resilience, and secure‑by‑design practices.
• Ensure engineering delivery meets all non‑functional requirements (performance, security, reliability, scalability, operability).
• Provide senior technical input into partner and vendor evaluations, PoCs, and technology selection supporting platform strategy.
• Line Management - Experience leading and coaching senior engineers and multi‑disciplinary technical teams, building a culture of excellence, autonomy, and continuous improvement.
• Leadership - Ability to influence technical direction across multiple squads, guide high‑stakes design decisions, and drive alignment across Digital & IT, Networks, Security, and Product.
• Communication - Skilled at communicating complex technical concepts clearly to executives, architects, engineers, and non‑technical stakeholders, including decision‑making rationale.
• Vendor Management - Experience evaluating and guiding external partners or engineering suppliers to ensure high‑quality technical delivery aligned with platform standards.
• Agile - Deep experience working within modern product‑centric and agile environments, enabling autonomous squads, improving flow, and embedding iterative, incremental technical delivery practices at scale.

Who you are

• MSc or equivalent in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Telecommunications, or related field.
• 10+ years engineering experience with at least 5 years in senior/principal technical leadership roles.
• Deep expertise in cloud‑native architectures, microservices, event‑driven systems, API‑first design, distributed systems, and modern DevOps/SRE practices.
• Strong hands‑on experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability frameworks, infrastructure‑as‑code, container orchestration, and platform engineering.
• Demonstrated success leading engineering delivery across multi‑squad, multi‑market or large‑scale digital platform environments.