Head of Platforms - Technology, Infrastructure and Operations

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Strategy & Vision

• Contribute to the definition and assert the delivery needs related to the platform strategy in line with Elsevier’s policies and standards.
• Translate strategic objectives (reuse, DevEx, GenAI/automation) into clear plane roadmaps.
• Establish Elsevier’s “platform as a product” operating model—integrating developer experience, governance, and self-service capabilities.

• Leadership & Organization Design

• Build and lead a global platform organization (~95 initial with the potential to grow to 125 people over time) across functional planes (Core Platform, Data & AI Services, Observability, Guardrails, etc.).
• Partner closely with the TIO Strategy Lead, Chief Infrastructure Architect, and Change Management to align operational and cultural changes with delivery models/organizational needs.
• Continue our evolution towards an engineering-led and automation first organization.

• Developer Experience & Enablement

• Oversee delivery of the internal developer portal (Backstage) and golden path standards for onboarding, CI/CD, and observability.
• Embed developer experience metrics (DORA, SPACE) into delivery performance and drive measurable improvement.
• Champion reuse and inner sourcing across the platform community.

• AI & Automation Integration

• Integrate AI assistants, code generation, and AI-augmented testing within the platform to accelerate development and reduce toil.
• Ensure the technology goals of evolving to an AI-driven SDLC are incorporated into the overall approach of the platform.
• Drive a culture of “secure and efficient by default” through embedded automation and policy guardrails.

• Operational Excellence

• Ensure platform services and related workloads are reliable, observable, and cost-optimized (FinOps and sustainability focus).
• Oversee on-call and resiliency strategies aligned to new platform operating models.
• Measure and report on platform maturity, adoption, and developer satisfaction across Elsevier.

• Collaboration & Influence

• Work cross-functionally with TIO leadership, ISDP, and Business Unit CTOs to align platform capabilities with product and regulatory requirements.
• Represent Elsevier externally in engineering and developer productivity communities.
• Ensure close alignment with the Business Unit-aligned (also known as stream aligned) cloud engineering communities to foster adoption of platform capabilities, via Pods and other enablement functions.

Experience & Skills

• Technical Leadership: 15+ years in software/platform/operational engineering; proven success building and operating internal products, platforms or large-scale developer enablement systems.
• Strategic Execution: Experience leading transformations, balancing build/buy strategies, and scaling organizations.
• Product Mindset: Strong background in “platform as a product,” developer experience, and service ownership models.
• People Leadership: Track record of growing distributed engineering teams with clear boundaries, autonomy, and accountability.
• AI Fluency: Familiarity with GenAI integration in SDLC and developer workflows.
• Operational Acumen: Strong grounding in SRE, observability, FinOps, and secure-by-design engineering.
• Influence & Communication: Able to partner across architecture, product, and business teams; comfortable operating at both executive and engineering levels.

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