Head of Platform Engineering

Location: New Zealand

Department: Engineering

Workplace: remote

Employment Type: full

Description

Education Perfect is an EdTech platform designed to empower educators and amplify their impact in the classroom. We enable teachers to personalise learning at scale with a range of powerful learning, assessment, and insights tools, helping them and their students reach their full potential.

As an EPeep, you’ll work on projects that have a real impact on students' lives and have the freedom, support and resources you need to develop your skills and grow your career.

We’re hiring a Head of Platform Engineering to lead EP’s platform and enablement teams. This role is central to accelerating software delivery by owning the internal developer platform, improving developer experience and ensuring our infrastructure is secure, scalable, reliable and cost-effective. You’ll combine technical leadership, people management and strategic thinking to empower engineering teams to build and operate high-quality software at scale.

What you will do

• Lead, coach and develop platform and enablement teams (frontend, backend, DevOps/SRE)
• Create a safe, inclusive and high-performing team environment
• Define and maintain platform team charters and collaboration boundaries
• Own the internal developer platform strategy (tooling, golden paths, self-service)
• Partner with engineering leadership on architecture, strategy and roadmap
• Drive platform standards (APIs, observability, reliability patterns)
• Support capacity planning and reliability targets (SLOs/SLIs)
• Improve developer experience and productivity metrics
• Embed operational thinking across software engineering teams
• Partner with Security & Privacy on controls and compliance (ISO 27001, ST4S, GDPR)
• Champion engineering excellence across the wider team
• Manage relationships with cloud and platform vendors
• Optimise cloud usage and strengthen FinOps practices
• Represent platform engineering in governance and architecture forums

About you

• 8+ years designing, building and operating cloud software at scale
• Strong technical leadership and people management experience
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and align work to business goals
• Experience leading through influence across cross-functional teams
• Deep understanding of cloud architecture, operations, security and cost models
• Track record of improving developer experience and platform tooling
• Familiarity with CI/CD, self-service platforms and enablement practices
• Strong commercial acumen (vendor management, negotiations, build-vs-buy)
• Experience with FinOps or cloud cost optimisation
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, risk and dependencies
• Experience working with distributed teams
• Tech stack familiarity is a bonus (C#, TypeScript, React, Kafka, Terraform, AWS)

Equitable opportunities, growth, and development lie at the heart of how we work at EP. We understand that not all applicants may possess all the following attributes so if you think you have what it takes, but are not sure you check every box, we would love to still hear from you!

What we offer

• Employee Equity Bonus Plan – Share in our success through equity bonuses that build ownership and collective growth
• Christmas Shutdown Leave – Enjoy three additional paid leave days
• Volunteer Day – One paid day each year to give back to your community
• Purchase Extra Leave – Choose to buy an additional week of annual leave, with payments spread across the year
• Work From Anywhere – Work up to 90 days per year from another country
• Wellness Bonus – Receive a pre-tax $750 NZD End-of-Year Wellness Bonus to support your wellbeing
• Health Insurance – Fully funded Southern Cross Wellbeing 1 plan ($500 excess), with optional add-ons and family cover
• Home Set-Up Support – Support available for eligible remote and hybrid team members to create a comfortable workspace
• Communication Allowance – $50 NZD per month toward phone and internet costs (remote/hybrid eligible)
• Parental Leave Support – Up to 12 weeks’ full-pay top-up for primary caregivers, 3 weeks’ paid leave for secondary caregivers, plus 5 days’ New Parents Leave for both. Returning primary caregivers also receive enhanced pension contributions.
• Employee Assistance Program – 24/7 confidential wellbeing, safety and medical support via Sonder (fully funded, global access)
• Learning & Development – Internal workshops, performance conversations and ongoing development opportunities
• Tenure Recognition – Bonus leave and cash rewards at key service milestones
• Referral Bonus – Earn a $2,000 NZD pre-tax bonus when your referral joins and passes their trial period
• Workride – Access bikes, e-bikes or scooters via pre-tax salary sacrifice and enjoy significant tax savings
• EP Support Groups – Mana Wahine, DEI, Environmental Impact, and Wellness Committees.

You’ll join a growing global organisation recognised through Diversity Works accreditation, Carbon Net Zero BCorp status and Digital Promise certification.