Senior Director, Engineering- X-Ops Platform

We are seeking a Sr. Director of Engineering to lead our X-Ops Platform organization. The leader will be responsible for all aspects of the platform ranging from vision, strategy and roadmap to product delivery and service execution.  The leader will coordinate with stakeholders to align business priorities and support engineering teams in delivering secure, high-quality software at scale using modern AI technologies.

You will set strategy and standards for how we build, run, and improve our platforms and operational tooling across the engineering lifecycle - partnering closely with Product, Security, IT, and Engineering leaders. Success in this role looks like improved developer productivity, strong service reliability and resilience, clear operational governance, and efficiency in cloud and platform spend and close alignment with Sophos X-Ops goals.

You bring enough technical depth to challenge and support senior engineers and architects, while spending most of your time enabling teams, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring execution against clear outcomes. You will have a strong grounding in Cyber Security, Cloud Computing and AI frameworks and development practices.

You will lead and grow multiple teams and managers, fostering strong engineering practices and a culture of ownership. You will collaborate with senior stakeholders across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance to ensure platform roadmaps and operational priorities support company goals.

This role is based in Abingdon UK with remote working and teams also in India and Hungary. Periodic in-person leadership and team collaboration and travel are needed.

Set the vision, strategy, and operating model for the X-Ops Platform organisation (e.g., Delivery Roadmap, AI First Developer Experience, CI/CD, Observability, SRE, Cloud & Infrastructure Enablement)

Lead, coach, and develop engineering leaders (directors, managers and senior ICs), building high-performing teams with clear ownership and strong engineering culture

Own platform reliability, resilience, and operational excellence: incident management, on-call standards, SLIs/SLOs, post-incident learning, and continuous improvement

Partner with product engineering and threat research leaders to improve productivity and delivery throughput across the software and service lifecycle

Drive cloud efficiency and cost transparency (FinOps): budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and optimisation initiatives in partnership with Finance and Engineering

Establish platform governance and standards (architecture, security, compliance, data handling, vendor/tooling choices) while enabling appropriate team autonomy

Build strong cross-functional alignment peer X-Ops leaders, and other operational stakeholders to ensure aligned feature delivery and service operations.

Actively drive responsible AI adoption within the organisation:

• Establish guidance, guardrails, and enablement for approved AI tools and workflows
• Measure impact and promote best practices that improve quality, speed, and operational effectiveness while protecting sensitive data
• Define and track meaningful metrics and outcomes; communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executive stakeholders

Cyber Security background and acumen

Significant engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and scaling teams in a platform, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or operations-focused environment

Strong track record of building reliable, secure platforms and improving developer productivity through pragmatic, outcome-driven investment

Experience establishing operational excellence practices (incident response, on-call, observability, SLOs, post-incident learning) and driving continuous improvement

Ability to set strategy and translate it into execution via roadmaps, prioritisation, and clear measures of success

Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to align across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance

Commercial and financial acumen, including experience with cloud cost management, budgeting, and performance metrics

Commitment to responsible AI adoption—setting guardrails, enabling teams, and demonstrating measurable improvements in productivity and quality

Desirable skills

Experience building and operating platforms at scale in a SaaS environment, ideally with multi-region cloud deployment

Familiarity with modern CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerisation, and observability tooling

Strong security and compliance mindset; experience partnering with security teams to embed controls into platform capabilities

Experience with organisational design, operating cadence, and change management in a complex engineering organisation

Exposure to FinOps practices and tooling, including unit cost models and cost allocation/chargeback approaches

Comfort working with technical teams and/or technical concepts

Experience improving processes, introducing new ways of working, or leading small change initiatives

Experience with AI-assisted productivity or development tools in a professional setting