How do you make our customers happy?
E-commerce is rapidly evolving. We must continuously improve our efficiency to keep pace with market conditions, including increased competition from Chinese vendors and heightened regulatory requirements. The better we succeed, the more we can focus on innovations that truly matter to our customers. We’re currently restructuring our approach to this process to ultimately achieve more with less. Simultaneously, we are continually adding frictionless products and platform-centric services to enhance our Technical Platform and boost the innovative development culture for our autonomous product-led teams and thriving engineering community.
The biggest challenge
The bulk of our workload runs in the Google cloud to improve innovation speed, usability, and autonomy for our developers. Autonomy is crucial to speed up development, so empowering teams to adopt a “you build it, you run it, you love it” mindset is a core part of our mission. We do this by removing obstacles and providing a “golden path” that is reliable, secure, and compliant. Can you improve our platform to benefit from standardization, boost innovation, and enhance the developer experience?
What You’ll Do As Head Of Tech Platform
You’ll join our Tech Management team and spearhead the Technical Platform domain (about 100 people across 11 teams) which encompasses Engineering Productivity, Engineering Tooling, the Application Platform, and all the solutions that run on it. As for the scope: our platform solutions are crucial for all product teams, regardless of expertise or scope. You’ll tackle impactful projects and products, including strategically guiding our scalable infrastructure initiatives based on the merits of on-prem and public cloud technologies, with a keen eye for cyber risks, built-in compliance, and delivering a seamless developer experience. While your main focus will be on the Technical Platform technology, you will also be actively involved in bol’s broader tech initiatives. The role comes with substantial responsibilities.
Ensure Tech Platform engineering teams achieve their objectives and goals by cultivating a culture of entrepreneurship. You lead by encouraging, coaching, and challenging.
Attract and motivate top talent and create an environment in which tech talent flourishes and strives to make a positive impact on customers, partners, and colleagues. Be a true leader, stimulate strong alignment and data-driven decision-making, and improve platform reliability so product teams can focus on maximizing business value.
Balance innovation power and tech health with your e(principal) engineering mmanagers, and heads of product, and staff engineers. Deliver scalable, secure, cost-effective products that add value for our 900+75 engineers . Continuously boost their productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency.
Promote and strengthen the bol culture of openness, cooperation, learning, freedom, trust, ownership, challenging goals, and having fun along the way.
Contribute to the IT strategy as a proactive and passionate member of the IT Technologyh leadership team (Technology MT) and execute ‘horizontal’ IT tech initiatives, such as adopting technical platform products and engineering & architecture frameworks.
Why you can make a difference
Because you’re an empathic, approachable, and supportive coach. You value developing craftsmanship as much as having fun and know how to balance these objectives. This role requires extensive experience with a major Cloud platform (GCP is our favorite) and in-depth tech expertise, including Kubernetes & Vmware, Oracle, PostgresSQL, CloudSQL, Bigquery, and ELK. Applying your knowledge of ISP intricacies and securing against DDos attacks makes the job even more appealing. We also expect you to be versed in Platform as a Service technology. If Backstage and Spring Boot only evoke images of concerts and footwear, this role won’t be a great match.
Given our size and visibility, you need to be at least one step (the more, the merrier) ahead of security risks and experienced in building secure scalable platforms. Gitops, Zero Toch Production, Dast/Sast? All in a day’s work. Tech savviness aside, this role calls for proven people skills: you need to coach and inspire top-notch engineers and product managers, stand your ground in meetings, and foster commitment to your vision and plans
3 reasons why this is (not) for you Switch to find out
Not too techie, please You have a hard time understanding colleagues with ‘purely’ technical backgrounds.
Singular focus If you have a tech-only mindset and sweep user requirements under the rug, this role isn’t for you. As Head of Tech Platform you need to adopt a colleague centric approach, and always keep close tabs with developers, ensuring that the Tech Platform maximally boosts the impact on the product & tech communities.
Strategically challenged You lack the necessary strategic view of infrastructure capabilities to advise and decide on capabilities like Kubernetes Enterprise (yea or nay?), Istio service mesh vs. Google Anthos, and SaaS vs. on-prem.
Old head You’re a highly experienced (10+ years) tech pro who exudes thought leadership and is demonstrably successful at driving product thinking in a tech environment.
Tech head You were practically raised in technology companies, e.g., SaaS providers or IT firms. We’re looking for an experienced guide, not a tourist.
Operational mindset You have an in-depth understanding of software building processes and operational responsibilities in a “you build it, you run it” environment.
This is where you’ll work
You will report to the senior director Technology and are a very welcome member of the Technology Management Team. You’ll work closely with the engineering directors and the Heads of Enterprise Architecture and Cyber Security. In all, you are responsible for the success of approximately 100 engineers.
