Senior Director of Platform & Data Engineering

Keyloop is a leading automotive retail software business, operating across 100+ markets and backed by Francisco Partners. As we accelerate our transition to a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform, Platform & Data Engineering sits at the heart of our technical strategy. This is a high-impact leadership role reporting directly to the CTO, responsible for setting and executing the platform strategy that enables Keyloop's product engineering teams, powers our data and AI capabilities, and provides the integration fabric for an acquisitive, multi-product business. Responsibilities: 1. Leadership & Team Development • Lead and develop a diverse, distributed team of platform and data engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and clear career pathways to ensure high performance and professional growth. • Build and refine the organisational structure of the platform function, including defining team topologies that support product engineering teams as internal customers. • Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on developer productivity and platform reliability. 2. Platform & Technology Strategy • Ensure security, stability, and scalability are foundational properties of the platform - not afterthoughts - with clear ownership of reliability targets, security-by-design standards, and the capacity to serve a growing SaaS customer base across 100+ markets. • Co-own the multi-year platform engineering roadmap with the Platform Product Leader, translating commercial and product priorities into a coherent engineering delivery plan. • Lead the evolution of Keyloop’s shared services, API gateway, integration layer, and internal developer platform (IDP) to serve as the technical foundation across all product lines. • Establish API-first as a non-negotiable architectural principle - every platform capability must be accessible via a well-governed, versioned API surface before any other access pattern is considered, enabling both internal product teams and external ecosystem partners to build reliably on top of Keyloop infrastructure. • Drive cloud-native architecture decisions, leveraging AWS services and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform/Pulumi) to ensure scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency. • Champion platform security-by-design, ensuring adherence to enterprise security standards, compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), and Keyloop's obligations as a custodian of sensitive automotive retail data. 3. Integration & Acquisitive Platform Capability • Architect and evolve the integration platform that enables Keyloop to onboard acquired businesses and codebases efficiently, reducing time-to-integration across M&A activity. • Define and maintain shared platform capabilities including identity, authentication, multi-tenancy, data residency, and OEM connectivity standards. • Ensure the platform acts as the enabling layer across Keyloop’s product portfolio, providing consistent APIs, event streaming, and shared infrastructure rather than duplicating capability across product teams. • Design and deliver low-code/no-code integration capabilities that enable rapid, standardised connectivity with third-party systems across the automotive ecosystem, including OEM partners, dealer group platforms, and acquired businesses. Build on modern integration tooling (including n8n) to reduce time-to-integration and enable non-engineering teams to configure and operate integrations where appropriate. 4. Data & AI Platform • Lead the design and delivery of Keyloop's data platform, including data lakes, data pipelines, and analytical infrastructure to power BI, reporting, and AI-driven product capabilities. • Build and operate the infrastructure layer for AI and ML