About the role

Role Overview

Associate Director, Platform Engineering at Relation. You will lead the team responsible for Relation’s hybrid compute infrastructure, developer platform, and scientific compute environments that power its machine learning and drug discovery work.

Key Responsibilities

Partner with the VP of Engineering and collaborate with Engineering, Data Science, and Machine Learning to define and evolve the platform strategy.
Own the architectural strategy for Kubernetes-based clusters and broader hybrid infrastructure, setting technical standards and guardrails.
Lead and develop the Platform Engineering team: hire, retain, set expectations, and enable high performance.
Own the scientific compute platform, ensuring reliability and efficiency for ML and data science teams.
Treat the platform as a product and internal engineers/scientists as customers by driving maturity across:
- CI/CD pipelines
- Internal services
- Developer tooling
Establish observability and robust disaster recovery/failover across on-premises and cloud environments.
Own platform security controls including:
- IAM
- Secrets management
- Network policy
- Vulnerability management
- Ensure compliance with data governance standards for a clinical-stage biotech handling sensitive patient-derived data.

Requirements

Significant experience in platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering with a strong record of building and operating complex production environments.
Experience leading engineers (formally or informally) with ownership from strategy through delivery.
Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, mentor engineers, and take accountability for live production systems.
Strong hands-on operational experience.
Participation in on-call rotations for production infrastructure.

Nice-to-Have / Not Fully Specified

Experience with scientific/ML compute platforms and workflows (not explicitly listed beyond scope).
Experience with governance/security requirements specific to patient-derived data environments (implied).

About Relationrx

Relation is a sector-defining TechBio company focused on transformational medicines, using technology to understand human biology in unprecedented ways. It leverages single-cell multi-omics, functional assays, and machine learning to drive disease understanding and accelerate drug discovery. Based in London, the company operates state-of-the-art wet and dry labs alongside advanced computational platforms.