Director of Technology - Platform Foundations

Location: London

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Technology

In short

Everything we build in Technology at On fuels our mission to ignite the human spirit through movement. We craft technology that improves with every interaction. Delivering "Wow" through our platforms, apps, and services is a core value.

We are looking for a visionary leader to own and lead the evolution of our technology platform foundations, ensuring it serves as the bedrock for rapid, secure, and cost-aware innovation.

We believe in ownership and internal accountability, not outsourcing change. We are looking for a leader who builds internal capability to drive our evolution from within.

Your Mission

Architect the Vision: You will lead the strategy to build a highly autonomous platform where operational friction is minimized. You will drive a shift toward intelligent automation, ensuring our systems scale effortlessly to meet market demands.
Strategic Cloud Evolution: Lead a major architectural shift toward Google Cloud as our primary compute and data engine. Simultaneously, you must define a pragmatic multi-cloud strategy that governs our existing enterprise and regional cloud footprints. Your goal is to establish a unified centre of gravity while ensuring interoperability across a heterogeneous landscape.
DevEx as a Product: Champion the 'Golden Path' methodology. You will move beyond simple automation to architect a declarative Service Contract strategy. By abstracting the complexity of the underlying cloud and container orchestration, you will enable product teams to self-serve infrastructure that is secure, compliant, and cost-optimized by default.
Adaptive Resilience: Move us beyond reactive support. You will implement proactive incident response, automated chaos engineering, and self-healing security controls to build systems that learn from failure.

Your Responsibilities :

Cloud Architecture & Runtime Evolution: You will lead the transition of runtime infrastructure to Google Cloud, architecting a multi-region foundation designed for global resilience. You will ensure the platform is built with portability in mind, creating standardized ingestion paths that allow us to seamlessly migrate and onboard services from any cloud provider with minimal friction.
Unified Identity Strategy: You will ensure that secure access to infrastructure and applications is standardized and centralized, reducing fragmentation while improving security posture.
Team Evolution & Topology: You will architect a scalable team topology that creates clear distinction and synergy between Core Infrastructure (the builders) and Developer Experience (the enablers). As the strategic bridge between Platform and Product Engineering, you will ensure that every technical investment we make is financially efficient and directly accelerates business velocity.
Hyper-Automated Delivery: Evolve our CI/CD into a Hyper-automated CD ecosystem with intelligent rollback and canary strategies. You will drive the adoption of GitOps with integrated security gates to ensure speed does not compromise safety.
Modern Developer Enablement: Formalize and roll out advanced tooling and coding assistants to augment developer productivity. You will ensure our toolchain (including GenAI where impactful) acts as a co-pilot for our engineers.
Predictive Observability: Deploy a centralized observability platform focused on anomaly detection. You will shift the culture from "fixing outages" to predicting and mitigating issues before impact.
Cost Optimization & FinOps: Leverage automated insights for proactive budget alerts and license management. You will ensure financial efficiency is embedded into the platform's design through automated software decommissioning and renewal optimization.

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Your story

Evolutionary Leader: You have a proven track record (10+ years) of evolving engineering cultures. You don't believe in "transformation" projects; you believe in building systems that continuously adapt and improve through internal ownership.
Cloud Strategy: You have deep experience with public cloud architecture. Experience leading AWS to Google Cloud migrations or managing complex Google Cloud environments is a critical differentiator.
Platform Product Mindset: You treat your platform as a product. You have experience creating intuitive developer portals and ensuring your tools reduce friction, empowering teams to "Dream On."
Pragmatic Innovator: You see value in modern tooling (including AI/ML) not as a hype cycle, but as a lever for efficiency. You have experience implementing GenAI code assistants or similar productivity tools in a way that creates tangible impact.
Resilience & Security Authority: You understand Adaptive Resilience. You are comfortable driving Chaos Engineering adoption and embedding "Security by Design" into the platform DNA.

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About the Team

You will be part of the Global Technology Leadership Team and lead the Platform Foundations team which operates as a visionary engine of "enablers," treating our infrastructure as a product to ensure that innovation at On is rapid, secure, and cost-aware.

Our Key Principles :

Intelligent Operations: We leverage data and modern automation for predictive insights and decision-making, reducing manual toil in daily operations.
Autonomous Scalability: We empower systems to manage scale and maintenance tasks, freeing up engineers to focus on strategic innovation.
Adaptive Resilience: We build systems that are anti-fragile—learning from failure and proactively re-architecting themselves.
Human-Centric Augmentation: We design systems that amplify human capabilities, acting as intelligent partners to our engineering teams rather than replacing them.

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What we offer

On is a place that is centered around growth and progress. We offer an environment designed to give people the tools to develop holistically – to stay active, to learn, explore and innovate. Our distinctive approach combines a supportive, team-oriented atmosphere, with access to personal self-care for both physical and mental well-being, so each person is led by purpose.

On is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that is fair and inclusive, where all decisions related to recruitment, advancement, and retention are free of discrimination.

Build the better you

What to expect

We want to set everyone up for success, so here’s the lowdown on how we hire. Our process is a two-way street – bringing you into our culture, while helping us learn how you think.

Our full process can last about eight weeks from application to offer, because we care about getting it right. These steps explain how we usually do things.

Before you get started, feel free to consider if you want to work with us. Strange question? Well, we give people a lot of space to navigate their day-to-day and that style isn't for everyone. We want you to be passionate about what you do and be sure this is the right fit. Because when skills and passion combine – it creates that 'Wow' moment.