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Associate Director, Platform Engineering

relationrx· Engineering
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LondonFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Leader of the Platform Engineering team responsible for hybrid compute infrastructure, developer platform and scientific compute environments powering Relation’s machine learning and drug discovery work. Owns architectural strategy, builds and develops the team, and aligns platform evolution with scientific needs across on-premises and public cloud environments.

Responsibilities

  • Partner with the VP of Engineering and peers across Engineering, Data Science and Machine Learning to define and evolve Relation’s platform strategy.
  • Own the architectural strategy for Kubernetes-based clusters and broader hybrid infrastructure, setting technical standards and guardrails.
  • Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team, hiring and retaining engineers, setting clear expectations and enabling their best work.
  • Own the scientific compute platform, ensuring it reliably and efficiently meets the evolving needs of ML and Data Science teams.
  • Drive maturity of CI/CD pipelines, internal services and developer tooling, treating the platform as a product and its customers as internal engineers and computational scientists.
  • Establish comprehensive observability and robust disaster recovery and failover strategies across on-premises and cloud environments.
  • Own platform security controls (IAM, secrets management, network policy, vulnerability management) to meet data governance standards for a clinical-stage biotech working with sensitive patient-derived data.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience in platform, infrastructure or DevOps engineering with a track record of building and operating complex production environments.
  • Experience leading engineers with responsibility for significant workstreams from strategy through delivery, setting technical direction, mentoring, and owning live production systems.
  • Strong hands-on operational experience, on-call rotations, incident response and post-incident improvements.
  • Deep expertise in Kubernetes and hybrid on-premises/cloud infrastructure.
  • Experience building, running or evolving MLOps infrastructure (notebook environments like Kubeflow, GPU compute for distributed training and model serving).
  • Familiarity with batch compute for data-intensive scientific workloads and reliability/scalability/reproducibility of scientific data pipelines.
  • Track record maturing CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling and observability across multi-environment platforms.
  • Strong security fundamentals with hands-on experience designing/implementing security controls.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication, ability to co-own strategy with senior stakeholders and clearly communicate platform strategy to technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Bonus: exposure to ISO 27001, SOC 2 or GDPR in a research/scientific environment.

Skills

Required:Platform engineering leadershipKubernetesMLOps / KubeflowCI/CD and observabilitySecurity controls (IAM, secrets, network policy)
Last updated Aug 26, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About relationrx

Discovering biology’s relationships, curing disease.

Discovering biology’s relationships, curing disease.

biotechmedicinebiologydiseasegenomicstherapy
Company profileWebsite

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