VP Engineering and Reliability
IFS · United Kingdom · 7d ago
Company Description
IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.
At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.
We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.
By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.
We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.
If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.
Job Description
To lead the engineering & reliability function within the “Technology Platform” organization responsible for the systems that other engineers build on: continuous delivery, automated infrastructure provisioning, database and performance engineering.
The VP is accountable for the reliability, security, performance and cost of these platforms, for the engineering standards applied across them, and for building a high-calibre, globally distributed leadership team.
Key areas of responsibility
1 Strategy and technical leadership
Own and communicate a multi-year technical strategy for CI/CD, provisioning, database engineering and observability, aligned to the wider cloud-first roadmap.
Set the architecture and engineering standards for platform services; act as the senior technical authority and design-review escalation point.
Build the business case for platform investment, including build-versus-buy decisions on tooling, and secure funding through the annual planning cycle.
Define and drive the modernisation path for the Oracle estate — consolidation, re-platforming, migration to managed or cloud-native services — with a clear, staged, risk-managed plan.
2 CI/CD and delivery engineering
Own the continuous integration and continuous delivery platform end to end: source control strategy, build systems, artefact management, pipeline orchestration, environment management and release automation.
Drive measurable improvement in DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate and mean time to restore — across all consuming product teams.
Embed secure software supply chain practice: dependency and artefact provenance, SBOM generation, signing, secrets management and policy gates in pipeline.
Treat internal developer experience as a product: define the golden paths, measure adoption and satisfaction, and reduce the cognitive load on product engineers.
3 Infrastructure provisioning
Own infrastructure-as-code standards, modules and pipelines across the cloud estate and remaining on-premise/private-cloud footprint.
Deliver self-service, policy-governed provisioning so product teams obtain compliant environments in minutes rather than weeks.
Enforce guardrails covering security posture, network segmentation, tagging, resilience tiers and cost controls; implement drift detection and automated remediation.
Own FinOps for the platform estate: forecasting, showback/chargeback, commitment management and a continuous cost-optimisation programme.
Ensure capacity, resilience and disaster recovery designs meet the business’s stated RTO/RPO commitments, and prove them through regular exercise.
4 Oracle Database Engineering
Own the engineering, automation and lifecycle of the Oracle estate: Oracle Database on virtual machines, Exadata (on-premise, Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service), RAC, Data Guard, ASM, Grid Infrastructure, RMAN and related tooling.
Set standards for provisioning, patching, upgrade, backup/recovery, cloning and refresh — automated and repeatable, not manually executed.
Drive database performance engineering: workload analysis, AWR/ASH-based diagnostics, SQL and schema optimisation, and capacity planning for Exadata resources.
Ensure high availability and data protection across the estate, including tested recovery and failover procedures for tier-one services.
Manage Oracle licensing exposure and cost in conjunction with Procurement and Legal; maintain a defensible position on licence compliance.
Lead the modernisation agenda — rationalisation, migration to Oracle cloud services or alternative engines where justified — with explicit cost, risk and benefit cases.
Partner with application engineering to raise database engineering competence in product teams and reduce reliance on specialist intervention.
5 People and organizational leadership
Lead, coach and develop a leadership layer of directors and senior managers across multiple locations and time zones.
Attract, hire and retain senior engineering talent in a competitive market; build succession depth for critical roles.
Set clear performance expectations, career frameworks and progression paths; address underperformance directly and fairly.
Build an engineering culture characterised by ownership, operational rigour, psychological safety and continuous improvement.
Manage the departmental budget covering headcount, tooling, licences and infrastructure consumption.
6 Governance, risk and stakeholder management
Ensure platform services meet regulatory, security and audit obligations [e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, sector-specific requirements] in conjunction with the organizations “Trust & Intelligence” function
Represent Engineering & Reliability at executive and board-level forums; translate technical risk into commercial language.
Manage strategic vendor relationships — cloud providers, Oracle, observability and tooling vendors — including commercial negotiation and performance management.
Partner effectively with Product, Security, Architecture, Operations and Customer Success on shared outcomes.
Qualifications
Essential Experience
- Substantial engineering leadership experience at Senior Director or VP level, including leading leaders, in an organisation of comparable or greater technical complexity.
- Proven accountability for a platform or infrastructure engineering organisation of 40+ engineers across multiple locations.
- Deep, credible experience across at least three of the domains:
- CI/CD and release engineering at scale
- Cloud infrastructure provisioning and infrastructure-as-code
- Oracle database engineering, including Exadata and Oracle on VMs
- Track record of running large-scale Oracle estates in production — RAC, Data Guard, Exadata — and of modernising or migrating them without disrupting the business.
- Demonstrated delivery of cloud-first transformation while continuing to operate significant legacy or specialised infrastructure.
- Experience defining and operating an SRE model: SLOs, error budgets, incident command and post-incident learning.
- Strong commercial capability — budget ownership, vendor negotiation, FinOps and Oracle licensing awareness.
- Experience in a regulated or high-availability environment where downtime carries material commercial or reputational cost.
- Evidence of building high-performing teams: hiring senior talent, developing leaders, and improving retention and engagement
Desirable Experience
Background in enterprise software, SaaS or a product organisation serving business-critical customer workloads.
Hands-on familiarity with [Azure / AWS / OCI], Kubernetes, Terraform, and a mainstream observability stack [Datadog / Grafana / Dynatrace / Elastic].
Experience of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer or Exadata Database Service.
Experience integrating engineering organisations following acquisition.
Relevant degree in Computer Science or Engineering; relevant cloud or Oracle certifications.
Additional Information
We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.