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Head of Platform & Security
atCentral GroupJob Purposes:
As Head of Platform & Security, you will lead and shape the strategic direction of our platform, building, scaling, and running a world-class cloud infrastructure. You will own the full platform engineering function, bring modern engineering, CD, developer experience and autonomy to all, and you become a strong and vocal leader for all our engineering teams.
You will own the security function. Your team will actively follow security best practices and topics, and own the security backlog for our organization. You will be supported and be an an active contributor to Central Group CISO community.
Responsibilities
Lead and grow a high-performing Platform & Security team, setting the vision, culture, and technical direction
Own the design, delivery, and evolution of highly available, flexible, secure and cheap infrastructure at scale
Enable great developer experience, leveraging trunk-based and continuous delivery pipeline to enable product engineering teams autonomy
Leverage extensive automation to embed standards, security and operational excellence into every stage of the development lifecycle
Drive a DevSecOps culture where reliability, availability, security are shared responsibilities for all team members
Stay actively engaged with security topics day to day — following the threat landscape, reviewing approaches, and remaining hands-on enough to guide the team and make sound technical decisions
Build and embed security fundamentals across The 1 Platform, developing and continuously improving generalisable approaches to authorization, authentication, abuse detection, abuse prevention, and auditing
Lead platform and product security incident response, ensuring timely detection, escalation, and resolution of security events
Oversee security auditing practices for platform infrastructure, ensuring compliance with internal policies and relevant regulatory requirements
Establish and govern reusable platform standards, golden paths, and self-service capabilities that accelerate product delivery
Define and own the platform and security roadmap, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term scalability, reliability, security, and cost sustainability
Serve as the executive-level technical authority for cloud, Kubernetes, CD, security, and shared infrastructure services
Act as a trusted technical advisor and strategic partner to engineering, product, finance, compliance, and executive stakeholders
Proactively identify and mitigate scaling, reliability, security, and cost risks before they impact customers
Own and drive the organization's FinOps strategy, ensuring effective cloud cost governance and optimization across compute, storage, networking workloads
Establish cost visibility, attribution, and accountability frameworks across engineering teams
Recruit, develop, and retain senior platform and security engineering talent; build a coaching and mentorship culture within the team
Define and report on engineering, security, and operational metrics, communicating platform health, progress, and investment trade-offs to senior leadership
Watch your leadership impact a rapidly growing company and the lives of our customers
Qualifications
Deep expertise in AWS/GCP, CD Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, API gateways
Demonstrated experience leading and scaling platform, security, engineering teams
Enthusiast to collaborate with all engineers towards excellence as a team
Proven track record of securing cloud environments, API gateways, and platform services at scale, including abuse detection, penetration testing
Strong knowledge of network infrastructure and cloud security architecture
Treats git as the source of truth for everything — infrastructure, configuration, and policy
Holds a BS/BA degree in computer science or a relevant field
Has at least 8 years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or DevSecOps/security engineering, with 3+ years in a senior leadership role
Strong command of computer science fundamentals and distributed systems principles
Passionate about reliability, performance, security, and building platforms that others love to use
An exceptional leader and communicator who can inspire engineers, influence executives, and build alignment across diverse stakeholders — from design to compliance
Operates with high autonomy and sound judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Thinks at the system, organizational, and business-impact level — not just at the component or team level
Brings a product mindset to platform engineering — focused on developer experience, internal adoption, and measurable business outcomes
Skills required
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Kafka
Experience required
- 8 years
Skills optional
- Cloud Computing
- Amazon AWS
Salary
- Negotiable
Job function
- Management
- Security
Job type
- Full-time
Company overview
In recent years, Central Group has expanded its global presence, notably acquiring several prestigious European department stores, including Selfridges in the UK and KaDeWe in Germany. This strategic expansion underscores the group's ambition to become a significan ...
Why join us: “A business is only as good as its people. That is why at Central Group we continually invest in people to build a business culture that thrives on Innovation, Customers, Relationships, Alliances and Ethics.” Because of the quality and commitment of our people i ...
Benefits
- Dental Insurance
- Health Insurance
- Performance bonus
- Pension Fund
- Professional development
- Transport Allowance
- Overtime pay
- Education Allowance
- Maternity leave
- Learning & Development Opportunities

