What are we looking for? 

 

Are you an experienced product leader with a passion for solving technical problems for engineering teams?  Do you have an interest in accelerating the delivery lifecycle for software teams?  Do you live and breathe topics like hosting, compute, CI/CD, security and tooling? Are you familiar with running and building AI features at scale? 

We have an open product director role within Skyscanner’s enablement team. The enablement team is comprised of four tribes: developer experience, platform, security, and employee tooling. The mission of this group is to provide secure, performant infrastructure and tools for Skyscanner teams.  This is an opportunity to have significant impact on the core productivity, efficiency and velocity of teams building a product that serves billions of travellers annually. This role will manage a small group of PMs that help drive the performance and effectiveness our core platform, reduce risk through healthy security practices, and ensure Skyscanner engineering teams have the right tools to do their best work. This role will oversee the prioritisation and promotion of technologies and practices that enhance Skyscanner’s ability to build, run, operate, and protect its product. 

The enablement team focuses on ensuring the availability and performance of our production systems, promotion of operational practices through developer experience, reduction of risk through effective security practices, and enhancements in productivity through first-class employee tooling. We are looking for someone with the skills to effectively define strategy and priority across the breadth of these domains 

 

 What will this role be responsible for delivering on?  

• Work closely with PMs, squads, and stakeholders to drive strategies and associated KPIs for the enablement team 

• Delivery and management of holistic enablement strategy and regular review and update of progress on key initiatives including technology transformations 

• Gather, define, and prioritize product requirements for Skyscanner platform technologies across hosting, compute, productivity, security, and tooling 

• Partner and evangelize with customer teams to promote awareness and adoption of enablement initiatives 

• Roadmap ownership for the enablement team  

• Dependency management and coordination requests between platform and partner teams 

• Management of a small team of enablement PMs  

 

What skills do we need? 

• Strong understanding and enthusiasm for concepts related to platform and infrastructure: dev ops, SRE, availability, reliability, observability, SLOs, etc. 

• Strong understanding of concepts related to developer experience; internal developer portals, operational excellence, SDLC improvements, engineering standards, DORA, etc. 

• General understanding of cloud storage including costing and tiering of storage, including replication implications, specifically AWS 

• General understanding of cloud compute providers, specifically AWS EC2/EKS 

• Familiarity with container technologies such as Kubernetes and its value to automation  

• General understanding of ransomware threats, associated mitigations, and common security frameworks like NIST or CIS 

• General understanding of AI concepts: data collection, modelling, inference, training and associated infrastructure 

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills 

• General computer science fundamentals. Your customers are engineers. 

 

What can we teach you? What will you learn? 

• How to construct a product vision for products and services built for engineering customers 

• How to align and drive best engineering practices for a horizontally distributed software org 

• Direct exposure to security practices for high traffic applications 

• Ability to apply concepts of developer productivity and operational excellence at scale 

• Exposure to metrics and operational workflows common to enablement platform teams responsible for operating and maintaining uptime for a complex set of services and vendors 

• Context around how things work “under the hood” for a multi-region ecommerce website 

• How to work effectively in an area with multiple internal customers with similar problems, but differing priorities 

• Effective techniques for prioritization, roadmap construction, and stakeholder management  

 

Where can this role be based? 

This role can be based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Barcelona