Head of Platform Foundations

Location: Bristol, England, United Kingdom; London, England, United Kingdom

Department: Engineering

Location: London or Bristol, UK (hybrid, three days a week in the office)

Level: Head of Engineering

Team: Platform Foundations

Salary: £115,200 - £144,000 + discretionary bonus

Contract: Permanent

Reporting To: Director of Platform & Security

Please note: This role requires an existing right to work in the UK. We can’t offer visa sponsorship, but we review sponsorship role by role, so keep an eye on our careers site for future opportunities.

About Kaluza

Kaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future.

Our platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life.

With teams across Europe, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen.

About the role

As Head of Platform Foundations, you’ll own the core foundations every Kaluza engineer and client builds on: the internal platform, production reliability, release pipelines and AI tooling. You’ll lead four teams (Platform Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Release Engineering, and AI & Enablement Engineering) through your engineering managers. The platform runs Kaluza Retail, Energy Optimisation and Customer Care across dedicated client instances in the UK, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Your mission is to make Kaluza scale reliably, with more clients, markets and meters without a matching rise in cost or operational load. You’ll also turn our early gains from AI-assisted engineering into how the whole technology organisation works. (The data platform sits outside this role, though you’ll own the AWS accounts it runs in.)

What you’ll do

• Set the multi-year platform strategy and roadmap with Product and Engineering leadership, so platform investment follows client and commercial priorities
• Make Kaluza scale repeatably at falling marginal cost, delivering new client instances, mass meter migrations and new markets
• Lead Kaluza’s AI transformation in engineering, embedding tooling, agents and guardrails into the development lifecycle, measuring the impact, and partnering with Product on the AI capabilities we offer clients
• Make reliability a feature clients trust, through SLOs, incident response and continuous improvement across all client instances
• Own how software ships at Kaluza, with CI/CD and progressive-delivery practices that let teams deliver safely and often, using frameworks such as DORA to measure and improve velocity
• Own cloud unit economics and FinOps, making investment and savings recommendations to the technology budget, and manage strategic partners including AWS and Datadog
• Lead, mentor and grow a UK-based team with a global remit, building a culture of engineering excellence and developing the next layer of leaders, while working with Security and IAM to build in compliance (ISO 27001 / 22301) and data residency

What you’ll bring

Ideally, you’ll have:

• Proven experience in a senior leadership role running an organisation’s Platform function, with a track record of hiring, mentoring and scaling high-performing platform and SRE teams through engineering managers
• Experience developing and delivering a multi-year platform strategy and roadmap with product counterparts
• Hands-on experience implementing AI tooling across an engineering organisation and measurably changing how it builds software, not just piloting it
• A track record of running production reliability at scale (SLOs, incident management, on-call) for a multi-tenant or multi-instance SaaS platform, with a strong grounding in modern cloud-native architecture (AWS preferred)
• Experience owning cloud unit economics and making the investment case to Finance, plus strong partner management with technology vendors
• Exceptional stakeholder management, including presenting platform strategy, risk and investment cases to executive leaders. Experience with DORA, internal developer platforms or platform-as-a-product thinking, regulated or data-sovereignty-sensitive markets (energy, utilities, financial services), or running a platform for external clients is a bonus

Our Values

Five values guide how we work at Kaluza:

• Play to win: Collective pride in decarbonising energy at scale.
• Solve the real problem: Cutting through complexity to focus on real-world outcomes.
• Build trust every day: Consistency, transparency and doing what we say.
• Own the outcome: Full accountability, wins and setbacks, without ego.
• Go further together: Collaboration, respect and different perspectives.

Our Perks

• Time off and family: 26 days’ holiday, plus 26 weeks’ full pay for new parents with no qualifying service period
• Health and security: Private medical insurance with virtual GP, life assurance, pension scheme, free mortgage advice and eye tests
• Pay and flexibility: Discretionary bonus, a Flex Fund of 5% of salary to spend on the benefits you want most, retail discounts through Perks at Work
• Growth and setup: Personal learning budget, home office budget
• Climate: Furthr, our climate action app

Come as you are

We want to meet people from all walks of life. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be, and we recognise talent on merit and potential. If you’re excited about the role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you.

Find out more on our careers page and LinkedIn. Our Applicant Data Protection Policy is here.