Platform Desktop Engineering Manager

As Platform Desktop Engineering Manager, you will build and lead a new Platform Desktop Engineering team within Core Infrastructure to ensure availability, security and evolution of the platform desktop service. You’ll align with Linux, security and provisioning teams to shape image builds, automation and hardware strategy. You drive cross-team collaboration, define standards and prioritise work to enable engineers to focus on high-impact research. This role offers hands-on leadership in a fast-paced, ideas-driven environment with a clear mission to scale and secure platform capabilities.

• Highly competitive compensation
• Lunch provided
• 30 days’ annual leave
• 9% company pension contributions
• Comprehensive healthcare and life assurance
• Cycle-to-work scheme

• Hire, onboard and develop Platform Desktop Engineers with clear objectives and career development
• Manage service performance including availability, estate health, patching, provisioning and user experience
• Own the support model with SLAs, incident management and escalation paths
• Balance operational demands with engineering work and long-term priorities
• Deliver the estate roadmap for image builds, provisioning tooling, automation and hardware refreshes
• Oversee change management, communications and post-incident improvements
• Define and report metrics on service performance and estate health
• Manage capacity, budget and hardware lifecycle across physical and virtual resources
• Collaborate with Linux Engineering, Security, Identity, Tech Support and other teams to manage dependencies
• Support joiner/mover/leaver processes in partnership with HR

• Experience leading an infrastructure, platform or endpoint engineering team
• Strong hands-on Linux expertise with package management, performance troubleshooting and log analysis
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines for OS image creation (Dagger, Packer, Jenkins or Bash)
• Experience provisioning bare metal and VM at scale (OpenStack and Ironic preferred)
• Strong enterprise security knowledge including vulnerability and patch management
• Judgement to balance security best practices with risk-based decisions
• Understanding of hardware provisioning and lifecycle management including vendor management
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management to influence priorities across teams
• Experience owning and improving production services end to end

• strong communication
• stakeholder management
• collaboration
• Linux
• package management
• performance troubleshooting