Head of Platform

About the role 
You will own and evolve the platform that sits between Nebius's core infrastructure and the engineering teams and customers building on top of it. That means defining what the platform is, driving its roadmap, and leading the team that builds and runs it. 

You are not maintaining a layer someone else designed. You are setting the direction for how Nebius exposes compute, storage, and networking to internal and external users — with a relentless focus on reliability, scalability, and developer experience. You partner closely with infrastructure, product, and engineering leadership to make sure the platform keeps pace with the business, and you hold the bar on what "production-ready" means. You bring technical depth and product thinking to a function that requires both. 

This platform has momentum and significant ambition. The person who takes this role will help shape how it scales. 

What you'll do 

• Manage and develop a team of platform engineers, setting a high bar for craft, operational discipline, and delivery — while aligning closely with engineering and business leaders to ensure the platform roadmap reflects both technical and commercial priorities. 

• Own the platform strategy and roadmap end-to-end — from developer tooling and compute orchestration to internal APIs, observability, and self-service capabilities for engineering teams building on Nebius infrastructure. 

• Define and uphold platform reliability standards. Own the SLOs and SLAs that matter to internal teams and external customers, and drive continuous improvement in availability, performance, and incident response. 

• Partner with infrastructure, data centre operations, and product engineering to ensure the platform layer abstracts complexity effectively and evolves in step with the underlying infrastructure. 

• Collaborate with engineering leads, security, compliance, and finance to translate business requirements into platform capabilities — ensuring the platform is not just technically sound, but commercially viable and compliant at scale. 

• Lead trade-off conversations on scope, architecture, and resourcing. You are accountable for what ships, and you drive the decision-making rather than waiting for consensus to form. 

• Translate ambiguous, high-level goals into structured platform initiatives with clear ownership, milestones, and measurable outcomes. Maintain visibility across the platform portfolio and communicate clearly on status and direction to leadership. 

• Represent the platform credibly with senior engineering leaders, executives, and enterprise customers across multiple geographies. You are the voice of the platform. 

• Triage escalations and production issues, distinguishing what the platform team owns from what should be routed elsewhere — and making sure both paths are fast. 

What we're looking for 

• A track record of building and running platform engineering functions at scale — not just maintaining what exists, but shipping meaningful improvements to reliability, developer experience, and capability. 

• An entrepreneurial background. You have built something, stood up a new function, or operated in genuinely early or ambiguous environments where you had to create structure and standards rather than inherit them. Ambiguity does not slow you down. 

• Deep technical fluency in platform and infrastructure engineering — compute orchestration (Kubernetes, bare metal), cloud-native architecture, observability, CI/CD, and internal developer platforms. You have built or operated systems at this layer, not just overseen them from a distance. 

• Enough familiarity with data centre infrastructure to have credible conversations with both engineers and executive leadership on capacity, deployment sequencing, and operational trade-offs. 

• Proven comfort operating with senior technical and executive stakeholders. You have sat across the table from engineering leadership and held the room on hard architectural or resourcing decisions. 

• Strong product and engineering judgement: you understand how platform capabilities translate into developer velocity and customer value, and what separates a platform that scales from one that becomes a bottleneck. 

• Discipline in what you commit to. You state only what is confirmed, flag estimates clearly, and do not over-promise timelines or capabilities. 

• Willingness to travel. This role requires senior presence across multiple geographies. 

What you'll join 
A small, senior team operating at the intersection of AI infrastructure and platform engineering, with direct access to Nebius's senior leadership. The platform is active and growing. You will be shaping the platform engineering function at an early and consequential moment, with real opportunity to build a team as the portfolio scales.