Location & working arrangement

London or Nuneaton, UK
Full-time, Hybrid working

We offer hybrid working, with occasional presence at one of our Holland & Barrett offices in London or Nuneaton (or another designated H&B location) for team meetings, collaboration sessions and key events.

About H&B

At Holland & Barrett, we bring together more than 150 years of heritage with modern digital thinking. Following a significant transformation, we are now a fully cloud-native organisation built on containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and event-driven architectures. Technology is central to how we serve millions of customers, and our ambition is to keep setting new standards in our industry.

We are seeking a visionary Head of Platform to lead the next stage of our engineering journey. This is a rare opportunity to create a greenfield observability platform from the ground up, shaping the way our teams operate, innovate, and deliver at scale.

The Opportunity

Our ambition is to build an operational platform that becomes the backbone of incident management, security operations, and service ownership across the business. The platform will provide a unified view of our entire ecosystem – spanning IoT and network assets through to cloud infrastructure – enabling faster, safer and more reliable delivery.

We are adopting a “platform as a product” mindset: our developers are our customers, and their experience is central to every decision we make. You will define how this product is imagined, built and evolved.

About the Role

As Head of Platform, you will combine strategic leadership with deep technical influence. You will lead talented engineers across SRE, DevOps and DevSecOps disciplines, partnering closely with security and product teams to embed resilience and protection into everything we do.

You will own the vision, architecture and execution of our observability platform while helping to shape a culture of experimentation, craftsmanship and continuous improvement.

Key responsibilities

• Define and deliver the roadmap for a new observability and operational platform

• Make critical architectural and technology decisions for a large-scale cloud-native estate

• Build, mentor and inspire a high-performing platform engineering organisation

• Champion a product-centric approach to internal platforms and developer experience

• Partner with security to embed DevSecOps principles by design

• Drive adoption of SRE practices to improve reliability, performance and incident response

• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to align technology with business outcomes

• Proven experience in a senior technology leadership role (Head of Platform / DevOps / SRE or equivalent)

• Deep expertise in SRE, DevOps and DevSecOps practices

• Strong background operating large-scale distributed systems in AWS

• Hands-on knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes and cloud-native patterns

• Experience with serverless and event-driven architectures

• Demonstrable success building and leading high-performing engineering teams

• Excellent stakeholder engagement and the ability to articulate vision and strategy

• Passion for developer experience and treating platforms as products

• Familiarity with observability ecosystems such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK and distributed tracing

Why Join Holland & Barrett?

• Build something truly new – with the autonomy to design a platform from first principles

• Influence the technology direction of an iconic, purpose-led brand

• Work with a forward-thinking leadership team that invests in engineering excellence

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits

• Flexible working that supports real work–life balance

If you are an innovative technology leader motivated by solving complex challenges and creating exceptional developer experiences, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply today and help us build the future of observability at Holland & Barrett.

#LI-CF1

What we offer:

Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits 

• Health Cash Plan  
• Life Assurance
• Bonus Scheme - Based on company & personal performance
• Virtual GP 
• Private Medical care
• FREE at-home blood test kit 
• Holiday Purchase option 
• Pension Contribution scheme
• Access to ‘Wellhub' with gyms, studios and wellbeing apps 

Discounts & Savings 

• 25% Colleague Discount with FREE Standard Delivery 
• Exclusive Discounts from a wide range of partners 
• £/€50 Annual Product Allowance to spend in store 

Learning & Development 

• Access to a variety of learning opportunities, including Level 2-5 Apprenticeships, Workshops and our Digital Learning Library 
• AND MORE! 

Holland and Barrett is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome diverse perspectives and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all colleagues. We understand that when our colleagues are listened to, respected and valued for who they are, we build an organisation with belonging at its heart – making health and wellness a way of life for everyone.

Holland & Barrett does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Please do not forward resumes to our job alias, employees, or any other company location. Holland & Barrett is not and will not be responsible for any fees if a candidate submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless otherwise agreed with respect to specific open position(s).