Platform Manager

Platform Manager | Azure | £80,000–£90,000 | Manchester - Hybrid How much of your week do you still spend building? This position needs someone who can make the architecture decisions, get into the code and help three engineers deliver better work. You’ll own an established Azure platform and decide how it develops. Reliability, performance and cloud spend sit with you, alongside a clear brief to make operations more proactive: spot problems earlier, automate recurring fixes and put AI to practical use. There’s a team of two Platform Engineers and a DevOps Engineer. They need someone with the technical depth to work through difficult problems alongside them and give the platform a clear direction. What you’ll be doing - Own Azure architecture and build the infrastructure and automation behind it. - Get proper visibility across API health, platform performance and cloud costs, then act on what the data tells you. - Build AI-assisted incident detection, triage and automated responses, with clear escalation when someone needs to step in. - Improve Azure spend through better design, right-sizing and sensible cost controls. - Pair with engineers, review designs and stay close to delivery. Day-to-day IT support is outsourced. You’ll hold the vendor to agreed standards and handle technical exceptions. What we need from you - Deep Azure experience, with the judgement to design, build and operate production infrastructure. - Strong hands-on IaC, automation and secure CI/CD experience. - A track record of diagnosing performance issues and improving cloud costs. - Technical leadership that makes the engineers around you better. - Practical ideas for using AI in platform operations, with an understanding of where automation needs limits. The environment includes Azure, Entra ID, managed identities, Key Vault and Azure DevOps. Experience with AIOps or incident automation would be useful. What you get - £80,000–£90,000. - Ownership of platform architecture, technical priorities and cost improvements. - Three engineers to lead, with hands-on delivery central to your week. - The scope to take AI-led operations from an idea into production. If you’re a Principal or Lead Platform Engineer ready to own the function, or a Platform Manager who still builds, get in touch.