Platform Product Lead

Location/ working model: Hybrid - Located close to either Northampton or Bridgwater

We are Toolstation. One of the UK's leading multi-channel retailers of trade tools, building supplies, and hardware, catering to both professional tradespeople and home improvers. Operating as part of the broader Travis Perkins plc group, with a network of almost 600 stores, we focus on delivering low prices, quick convenience, and reliable product availability.

This is a deliberately hands-on role, part Product Manager and part Engineer, accountable both for the technology our teams build on and for the outcomes it delivers. You will own Toolstation's cloud platform as an internal product while leading how we build and ship AI and agentic capabilities across the business. 

Key responsibilities include:

• Core Platform Ownership: Own our GCP/GKE cloud runtime, integration & API gateway, Kafka event backbone, and identity/security platform with published roadmaps and service levels.

• AI & Agentic Capabilities: Lead the management of the Gemini agent platform (with access to Anthropic models), reusable patterns and governance to empower teams to ship AI safely and quickly.

• Stay Hands-On: Write and review IaC (OpenTofu/Terraform, Helm, FluxCD, CI pipelines) and build with AI directly to test standards first-hand.

• Platform Operations & FinOps: Own cloud costs as a platform outcome, attribution of spend, patch currency, availability scorecards, and end-of-life exposure.

• Technical Direction & Modernisation: Act as the accountable decision-maker across architecture/design reviews and drive in-flight modernisation programmes.

• Vendor & Team Leadership: Manage key vendor relationships (Google Cloud, Confluent, Tyk, Datadog) and grow the platform engineering team with SRE, DevSecOps, and agent engineering depth.