Head of Platform Foundations

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 reliabilit