Head of Platform Engineering (a) 100 %

Location: Zurich City (Weberstrasse), Glattbrugg (near airport) or hybrid within Switzerland

CONVOTIS Schweiz AG is part of an international IT group and has been offering innovative IT and software solutions with its own data centre for over 25 years. In the Technology & Engineering area, we develop and operate the platforms on which our customers from authorities, banks and healthcare run their applications – from managed private cloud and classic infrastructure to modern Kubernetes platforms.

For our Platform Engineering unit, we are looking for an experienced leader as Head of Platform Engineering (a) 100 %.

Design platforms. Lead teams. Take responsibility.

You are familiar with both classic infrastructure and modern platform technologies and want to further develop an engineering organisation technically and organisationally?

As Head of Platform Engineering, you take overall responsibility for around 20 engineers in four teams: DevOps/SRE, Infrastructure including Data Centre Operations, System Engineering and Platform Development. You lead and develop three team leads and report directly to our CTO.

Our platform world connects two generations: classic infrastructure with own data centres, virtualisation, Windows and Linux, network, storage and backup as well as container-based platforms with OpenShift on bare metal, GitOps and automation. At the same time, we are building our future GPU and AI platform.

Your goal: to further develop these worlds according to common engineering principles – with Infrastructure as Code, automation, SLOs, error budgets and observability.

• Development of our platform strategy and target architecture for classic and container-based workloads
• Leadership and further development of the three team leads as well as the entire platform engineering organisation
• Definition and establishment of common engineering standards such as Infrastructure as Code, reproducible environments and automated deployments
• Responsibility for stable platform operation including SLOs, error budgets, on-call duty, incident and problem management
• Positioning platform engineering as an internal platform provider for our delivery and operations organisation
• Definition of service catalogue, responsibilities, acceptance criteria, escalation paths and capacity commitments
• Capacity and lifecycle planning for data centres, hardware, virtualisation and Kubernetes platforms
• Review of offers with SLA or platform impact together with sales
• Budget responsibility including Capex planning, licensing strategy as well as supplier and contract management
• Consistent reduction of manual and recurring work through standardisation and automation
• Recruitment and further development of our engineering teams
• Representation of our platform towards customers in architecture questions, escalations, service reviews and audits

We don’t just want to tell you what you will do, but also how we will measure success together:

• Platform Engineering and Delivery/Operations collaborate based on clearly defined responsibilities, services and escalation paths
• Our platforms have defined SLOs, error budgets and clear responsibilities
• The four teams work with documented target states and measurable progress
• Our team leads independently lead their teams and make operational decisions
• Sales and Delivery have transparent capacity and cost forecasts
• Manual, recurring work is measurably reduced and increasingly automated

For this position, we are looking for an experienced engineering leader who combines technical depth with leadership and entrepreneurial thinking.

What matters to us

• Leadership experience in an infrastructure or platform organisation with 24/7 operation and SLA responsibility, for example as team lead, engineering manager or head
• Technical depth in classic data centre infrastructure such as VMware, Hyper-V or Proxmox, network, storage and backup
• Solid experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and observability
• Experience in introducing and further developing SRE practices such as SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, automation and post-mortems
• Experience with capacity planning, budget responsibility and supplier management
• Fluent German in spoken and written form as well as good English skills
• Residence in Switzerland and the requirements for a federal personal security check (PSP)

A plus

• Experience at a managed service provider, hoster, data centre operator or in the infrastructure environment of a bank, insurance or authority
• Experience in collaboration with delivery or service management organisations
• Experience in migrations from classic virtualisation to modern platforms in ongoing customer operations
• Knowledge of regulated environments and requirements such as ISO 27001, FINMA, data protection or audits
• Experience with GPU or AI infrastructure
• Experience in developing senior engineers or team leads into leaders
• Several years of leading team leads across multiple teams

You do not have to meet every one of our plus criteria. What matters to us is your leadership experience, your technical depth and your motivation to sustainably further develop our platform engineering organisation.

• Overall responsibility for platform engineering with direct reporting line to the CTO
• About 20 engineers in four teams and three team leads
• A versatile platform landscape with own data centre and colocation in Switzerland
• OpenShift on bare metal, an ongoing migration to Proxmox and the build-up of a GPU/AI platform
• Lots of scope for design in the technical and organisational further development of our platforms
  Hybrid working with up to 2 days home office per week
• Support for your professional development including coverage of costs for relevant training and certifications

Family-friendly working conditions

We know that work and private life must fit together. That is why we create conditions that support employees in different phases of life.

These include, among others:

• 16 weeks maternity leave with 100 % continued pay
• Flexible re-entry options after maternity leave
• Flexible working hours and hybrid working models, if the role allows
• Up to two weeks workation per year within Europe
• A corporate culture in which work, family and private life are compatible

Interested?

You don’t just want to manage an existing platform, but actively shape the technological future of CONVOTIS and further develop a strong engineering organisation?

Then we should get to know each other.

A CV is enough – a cover letter is not necessary. We will then get in touch for a first short meeting via MS Teams.

We look forward to hearing from you!