Position Title: Head of Platform Engineering

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Location: Remote (UK/EU preferred)
Contract type: Permanent

About BibliU

Sunday Times Tech 100 | Top 10 UK EdTech Company

BibliU is an award-winning education company that provides Day 1 access to affordable course materials, making learning more equitable and effective, in addition to providing campus store management. We partner with over 3,000 educational publishers, including Pearson, Oxford University Press, and Wiley, to offer a wide range of high-quality content to students. Our platform provides rich engagement data to academics and allows students to find information faster. We have disrupted the textbook industry by reducing the cost of education significantly and increasing publisher sales.

Founded in late-2015, we are a rapidly growing company transforming the way students and educators access and interact with learning materials. Our revenue has grown rapidly, with 150% YoY growth in the last three years. We raised $21m in a Series B funding round led by Nesta Impact Investments, with participation from Guinness Asset Management, Stonehage Fleming, and Oxford Sciences Enterprises.

In late 2023, we acquired Texas Book Company (now 'BibliU Campus') in order to deliver a more complete solution of products and services to higher ed students, faculty and administrators across the US! Since the addition of BibliU Campus, we have seen a dramatic increase in customers due to a much improved product market fit. We are very excited about our growth and are expanding the team to meet our new market potential!

We are a diverse and inclusive team of professionals who are passionate about education and technology. Our culture is fast-paced, innovative, and dynamic, and we are always looking for talented individuals to join our team.

Position Overview

As Head of Platform Engineering at BibliU, you'll be the architect of our technical foundation during a period of explosive growth. This isn't about maintaining the status quo—you'll be reshaping how we scale infrastructure to support millions of students across continents while dramatically reducing our operational overhead.

The Challenge: We've grown 150% year-over-year for three years running. Our recent acquisition has accelerated growth even further. Now we're planning for 10x growth over the next five years while expanding into additional products and services. What got us here won't get us there. We need someone who can architect systems that won't just handle today's scale, but can elegantly expand to support entirely new business lines while serving tens of millions of students across continents.

The Opportunity: You'll have direct influence over technical architecture decisions that impact global education. Your infrastructure choices will determine whether students in Manchester or Texas can access their materials instantly. Your cost optimisation work directly translates to making education more affordable. Your security implementations protect the academic futures of millions.

What Makes This Different: Most platform roles are about keeping the lights on. This role is about building the electrical grid from the ground up. You'll start as the technical leader of a 4-person platform team, but your real challenge is architecting both the systems and the organization structure needed to support 8-10x growth. You'll be working at the intersection of hands-on technical leadership, team building, and strategic platform design—shaping not just what we build, but how we build it as the team scales alongside our business.

Your Impact Areas

Infrastructure Evolution: Transform our current AWS estate from a collection of services into a coherent, multi-region platform that can support 8-10x growth over the next five years. You'll be making architectural decisions that need to seamlessly scale from our current footprint to supporting entirely new product lines and services, handling everything from peak registration periods to the launch of completely new business verticals without missing a beat.

Cost Intelligence: Turn infrastructure spend from a necessary evil into a competitive advantage. We're not looking for someone to just cut costs—we need strategic thinking about where to invest, where to optimise, and how to build cost awareness into our engineering culture.

Security Leadership: Own security posture across our entire technical stack. This goes beyond compliance checkboxes to building security-first thinking into everything we do, from data architecture to deployment pipelines.

Data Platform Modernisation: Lead the evolution of our data infrastructure to serve two new critical constituencies, in addition to existing in-app analytics: modernising retail systems for hundreds of physical campus bookstores (acquired through Texas Book Company) while simultaneously powering sophisticated account growth analytics for our internal teams. This dual challenge requires building unified data systems that can handle both real-time inventory management across retail locations and complex customer journey analytics for our digital platform growth.

Engineering Enablement: Build platforms and tooling that make our engineering teams more productive, not more constrained. Your infrastructure decisions should make deploying safer and faster, not slower and more complex.

Our Current Technical Landscape

• Languages: Full stack TypeScript
• Databases: RDS, DynamoDB, Redis
• Cloud: Exclusively Amazon Web Services
• Compute: Lambda, ECS, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: Amazon CDK
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

What We Need From You

Essential Experience

• Platform Leadership: 8+ years in platform/infrastructure roles, with evidence of leading technical strategy and teams
• AWS Mastery: Deep expertise across AWS services, not just familiarity. You should have opinions about when to use RDS vs DynamoDB, Kubernetes vs ECS, and the trade-offs involved
• Multi-Region Architecture: Proven experience designing and implementing systems that work across geographic regions with different compliance, latency, and availability requirements
• Cost Optimisation: Track record of meaningful infrastructure cost reduction while improving performance and reliability
• Security Leadership: Experience implementing comprehensive security strategies, not just using security tools
• Data Infrastructure: Expertise in modern data architectures, real-time streaming, and analytics platforms
• Technical Leadership with Team Building: Experience leading platform teams while remaining hands-on technically. You should be comfortable being the most senior engineer on a small team while simultaneously planning for organizational scale

• Operational Excellence: Designing for observability, maintainability, and incident response
• Developer Experience: Treating internal engineering teams as customers whose productivity matters
• Educational Mission Alignment: Understanding that our infrastructure directly impacts student success

What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart

• Prior scale-up experience: Understanding what it means to work in a rapidly growing organisation, with product-market fit, that has big ambitions
• Battle-Tested Scaling: Experience scaling platforms through hypergrowth periods, dealing with the messy realities of rapid expansion
• Cross-Functional Influence: Ability to work with product teams, finance, and executive leadership to align technical decisions with business outcomes
• Industry Recognition: Speaking at conferences, contributing to open source, or other forms of thought leadership in the platform/infrastructure space
• Educational Technology Understanding: Experience in EdTech, publishing, or other mission-driven technology environments is an advantage

Benefits

Our benefits are all aimed at supporting a healthy work-life balance and cultivating a company culture where you can bring your whole, human self to work.

Here's what we offer:

• 🌴 35 holiday days per year - yep, that's not a typo!
• 🎂 Your birthday off
• 🌱 12 scheduled company wellness Fridays off per year
• ⏰ Flexible working hours - we're a remote team spread across the US and the EU
• 💻 Work-from-home allowance to help you set up your dream WFH station
• 🚴 Cycle-to-work scheme (UK)
• 📈 Equity participation - you'll have a meaningful stake in BibliU's continued growth

We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds, experiences and identities to apply. Each new hire is an opportunity for us to bring in a different perspective and BibliU is committed to building an inclusive and supportive workplace where everyone can do rewarding work.

Please note: We do not work with external recruiters/recruitment agencies. This position will be filled directly by BibliU and we kindly request that external recruiters/recruitment agencies refrain from submitting candidates for this role.