Lead Platform Engineer Full Time

City, London
Definely

We’re looking for an exceptional Engineering Manager, Platform, to join Definely during a pivotal stage of growth. This is a player-coach role that combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, where you’ll shape the infrastructure, APIs, and developer experience that enable product teams to ship quickly, securely, and reliably at scale.

You’ll guide the evolution of our document processing pipelines, data stores, and AI integrations, while championing DevOps/SRE practices, observability, security, and cost efficiency. You’ll influence engineering culture, mentor engineers, and help define architectural direction across the company.

This is an opportunity to build the foundations of a global SaaS platform, making technical and strategic decisions that will define the next phase of Definely’s growth.

What you’ll do:

• Platform Architecture & Strategy: Own and evolve the technical roadmap for Definely’s platform services. Design scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient cloud-native systems for document and AI workloads. Define and uphold engineering principles and standards across teams. Partner with Product, Security, and Finance to align platform priorities with business goals.
• Infrastructure & Operations: Lead adoption of containers, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CDK). Build and enforce best practices in observability, monitoring, and incident response. Set and maintain SLOs/SLAs for platform reliability and performance. Drive FinOps practices: forecasting, monitoring, and optimizing infrastructure spend. Build internal tooling, templates, and pipelines to accelerate product delivery. Champion CI/CD adoption and empower engineers with self-service deployment capabilities. Improve developer productivity by standardizing environments and streamlining workflows.
• Security & Compliance: Partner closely with the ISO and Security teams to maintain compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR. Implement identity and access management, secrets management, and network security best practices. Drive a security-first culture across platform and product teams. Act as a technical mentor and coach, fostering growth and ownership within the team. Guide architectural decisions across product areas, balancing speed and long-term scalability. Influence engineering culture, encouraging adoption of DevOps and SRE principles. Collaborate with leadership on vendor evaluation, partner selection, and build-vs-buy decisions.

What you’ll bring:

• Proven experience leading or building platform teams in a high-growth SaaS environment.
• Expertise with AWS (preferred) / Azure / GCP, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, and observability.
• Strong API and event-driven architecture skills; familiarity with asynchronous pipelines.
• Track record of designing secure, multi-tenant architectures.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• A Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience).

We’ll be lucky if you have:

• Production experience integrating Microsoft Word (Office.js) add-ins with backend services; knowledge of M365 auth patterns.
• Hands-on experience with LLM/AI platformization (RAG, vector search, evals, safety/guardrails).
• Experience with FinOps practices and infrastructure cost management.
• Prior exposure to global scaling challenges (latency, data residency, multi-region deployments).

What we offer:

• Competitive Salary: Starting at £95,000
• Annual bonus: Recognising and rewarding the results you deliver, aligned with overall company success.
• Equity: We want everyone to share in Definely’s success, so you’ll receive stock options as part of your package.
• Hybrid flexibility: We come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the flexibility to work remotely the rest of the week.
• Learning and Development: Annual budget of £750 to spend on your learning, growth, and development
• Time Off: Enjoy 25 days of holiday per year, plus UK bank holidays, to recharge and unwind.
• Private Healthcare: Access to Vitality healthcare, including dental and optical.
• Enhanced Parental Leave: We support working parents with generous parental leave policies that go far beyond statutory requirements
• Workplace Nursery Scheme: Saving working parents lots of money through our salary sacrifice scheme!
• Cycle to Work Scheme: Save on a new bike and accessories while promoting a healthier, more sustainable commute.

About Definely

At Definely, we’re on a mission to simplify the way legal professionals access and understand complex information in legal documents. Trusted by a global community of customers, our LegalTech solutions integrate seamlessly into lawyers’ daily workflows, making it easier to draft, review and navigate even the most complex contracts.

Our products provide instant access to essential information, enabling legal teams to review clauses and provisions in context, reduce risk and work more efficiently – all without disrupting their flow. At Definely, we’re dedicated to solving real challenges faced by legal professionals.

Joining Definely means becoming part of a forward-thinking, collaborative team that prioritises innovation and people. We create a supportive environment driven by a shared commitment to connection, growth and success.

Recognised in the top 25 of Deloitte’s prestigious UK Technology Fast50 in 2023 and backed by Microsoft, Google and Octopus Ventures, we’re trusted by leading law firms and in-house legal teams, including A&O Shearman, Dentons, Deloitte, and Barclays, to streamline their workflows and mitigate risks.

Data Privacy Notice

By submitting your application, you agree that Definely may collect, process, and store your personal data as part of our recruitment process. We will use the information you provide to assess your qualifications for the role you are applying for and to communicate with you regarding your application. Your personal data will be stored for up to 12 months, after which it will be securely deleted unless we have another lawful basis to retain it. You have the right to access, correct, or request the deletion of your data at any time. For more details on how we handle your personal data and your rights, please email and we will send you our privacy policy.

If you have any concerns about how your data is being processed, please do not hesitate to contact us.