Associate Director - Platform Engineering

Blend is a premier AI services provider, committed to co-creating meaningful impact for its clients through the power of data science, AI, technology, and people. We help organisations solve complex business challenges by combining deep domain understanding with modern data and AI capabilities. Our teams work across strategy, analytics, engineering, and product delivery to create scalable, high-value solutions that improve decision-making, efficiency, and growth. Blend is seeking an Associate Director to lead the Platform Engineering workstream on a global product delivery. This is a senior, client-facing leadership role. The individual will own the platform engineering workstream end-to-end, act as the primary escalation point to the Delivery Leads, make key technical decisions in partnership with the client, and actively develop junior members of the platform team. Responsibilities Lead on project delivery and governance for the Platform Engineering workstream. Support and develop Platform Engineers across the engagement, providing technical direction and day-to-day guidance. Build and maintain a scalable, secure, and reliable cloud platform on Microsoft Azure, covering infrastructure, networking, identity, and environment strategy. Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and environment automation for engineering and data workloads. Define and promote best practices for infrastructure as code, security, monitoring, and observability across the team. Act as the primary escalation point to Delivery Leads for platform risks, blockers, and issues bringing context and recommended options, not just problems. Operate as Blend's senior technical for representative platform engineering in client-facing settings, building trusted relationships with client engineering and architecture stakeholders. Own key platform engineering decisions when working alongside the client, translating technical trade-offs into clear, business-relevant guidance. Champion good engineering practice