Director of Platform Operations

Job Description:

Director of Platform Operations

London/Stains/Manchester

12 Month Fixed Term Contract – Hybrid - Full-time

We make health happen

At Bupa, we help people live longer, healthier, happier lives and make a better world. Our technology plays a vital role in bringing this purpose to life — supporting the systems, platforms and services our colleagues and customers depend on every day.

As our Director of Platform Operations, you’ll be central to this mission. You’ll lead the teams responsible for keeping our foundational technology platforms stable, secure, and ready for the future. This includes strengthening the resilience of our heritage systems while guiding the safe transition towards next‑generation cloud environments, modern operational tools, and new ways of working.

The role also carries global reach. You’ll shape and embed a follow‑the‑sun operating model across the UK and India, making sure our platform operations are consistent, robust, and built for round‑the‑clock reliability. This is a unique opportunity to influence large‑scale change, uplift operational maturity, and support Bupa’s transformation as we modernise the technology landscape that underpins care for millions.

Key Responsibilities

As Director of Platform Operations, you will:

• Lead the uplift of operational maturity across Platform Operations, helping teams adopt strong, consistent practices in incident response, recovery, reliability engineering, change control and supplier management.
• Oversee the design and delivery of a unified operational rhythm across UK and India, creating a dependable follow‑the‑sun model that improves service consistency and responsiveness.
• Strengthen key operational frameworks including SLAs, SLOs, service health metrics, root‑cause analysis processes and operational governance.
• Drive stabilisation programmes across legacy platforms, focusing on eliminating recurring issues, improving controls, and strengthening day‑to‑day operational resilience.
• Embed modern observability and telemetry practices, improving how we monitor, detect and prevent issues across hybrid environments.
• Provide executive leadership during major incidents, improving command, communication and recovery capability.
• Ensure safe and compliant decommissioning of legacy platforms, including data cutover, archival and destruction aligned to regulatory expectations.
• Maintain strong operational alignment with CIOs, Platform Directors, Architecture, Security, Application teams and resilience functions.
• Lead and grow capability across UK and India teams, developing talent in areas such as cloud operations, SRE, observability and resilience engineering.
• Strengthen supplier performance and partnership management, ensuring value for money and clear accountability across multisupplier environments.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone who brings:

• Extensive experience improving operational maturity within complex and regulated environments.
• A strong background in networking, disaster recovery, resilience engineering, and operational readiness for critical systems.
• Experience implementing observability strategies and modern operational tooling across hybrid cloud and on‑premises estates.
• Confidence navigating IT risk, compliance and governance frameworks, including those influenced by PRA, FCA and DORA requirements.
• Leadership experience across hybrid global operating models, ideally split across UK and India.
• Strong commercial awareness, vendor‑management skills and experience overseeing multisupplier ecosystems.
• A track record of organisational transformation, with the ability to motivate teams through change and support high‑performing operational cultures.
• Familiarity with ITIL practices, alongside modern approaches such as SRE and resilience engineering.

Benefits

Our benefits are designed to make health happen for our people. Viva is our global wellbeing programme and includes all aspects of our health – from mental and physical, to financial, social and environmental wellbeing. We support flexible working and have a range of family‑friendly benefits.

Joining Bupa in this role you will receive the following benefits and more:

• 25 days holiday, increasing through length of service, with option to buy or sell
• Enhanced pension and life insurance
• Private medical insurance
• Access to our health and wellbeing services
• Discounts on Bupa products and services

Why Bupa

We’re a health insurer and provider. With no shareholders, our customers are our focus. Our people are all driven by the same purpose – helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world. We make health happen by being brave, caring and responsible in everything we do.

We encourage all of our people to “Be you at Bupa”, we champion diversity, and we understand the importance of our people representing the communities and customers we serve. That’s why we especially encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Bupa is a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer. This means we aim to offer an interview/assessment to every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for the role. We’ll make sure you are treated fairly and offer reasonable adjustments as part of our recruitment process to anyone that needs them.

Time Type:

Full time

Job Area:

IT

Locations:

Angel Court, London