Requirements :

- 10+ years building distributed systems; 5+ years leading platform architecture or platform engineering at enterprise scale.

- Proven delivery of a platform used by multiple teams or customers (multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS or internal developer platform).

- Production experience shipping LLM/RAG or search-heavy systems with measurable reliability controls : evaluation harnesses, regression gating, monitoring, and incident response.

- Strong security architecture fundamentals : identity, authorisation, encryption/secrets, audit trails, and governance.

- Track record of driving execution : architecture, build plan, delivery, operational handover.

- Experience in regulated industries (financial services a plus) : audit requirements, sensitive data handling, governance.

- Experience running cloud-neutral architectures (or multi-cloud) and Kubernetes-based platforms.

- Experience with hybrid retrieval systems (keyword + vector) and entitlements-aware retrieval patterns.

- Experience setting up FinOps guardrails for variable-cost workloads (LLM usage, GPU/compute).

What success looks like (first 90-120 days) :

- Published platform reference architecture, security model, and release/evaluation gates with stakeholder alignment.

- A working platform in a production-like environment : tenancy + model gateway + retrieval + end-to-end observability.

- Clear delivery roadmap (quarterly milestones) and platform operating model (reviews, standards, incident/postmortems).