Head of Platform Development

Head of IOT Platform Development

Edinburgh

£100,000 - £115,000

Are you a platform engineering leader with a passion for IoT, scalability, and cutting-edge cloud architecture? Be-IT is working exclusively with a high-growth technology company based in central Edinburgh to find an exceptional Head of IoT SaaS Platform Development to lead the evolution of their flagship cloud-native platform.

This is a rare opportunity to join a well-funded, scaling business at an exciting inflection point — with investment coming in and ambitious plans to grow from 500 to 10,000 connected devices over the next 2–3 years.

About the Role

Our client has been developing a cloud-native AWS SaaS platform for the past three years, built on a React front-end and Django web application framework with fully native AWS services for database, security, and deployment. As the business scales and onboards new customers and devices, they are now looking for a senior technical leader to drive significant improvements in performance, scalability, and high-volume data ingestion.

The platform receives telemetry from environmental sensors (including infrared and visual monitoring devices) deployed across critical infrastructure sites. Anomaly detection triggers high-volume data transmission to the platform, which is used to generate actionable condition reports for customers — for example, identifying thermal stress in underground cabling or circuits before failure occurs.

You will lead the development and technical direction of the SaaS platform, overseeing a current team of five (infrastructure/DevOps, application developers, and front-end/full-stack engineers) with plans to grow by a further three this year — including two AI application developers and an additional core applications engineer.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural direction and ongoing development of the AWS cloud-native IoT SaaS platform, with a focus on scalability, performance, and high-volume data ingestion

• Drive improvements across loose-coupled device-to-platform integrations, ensuring devices are more closely monitored and managed

• Oversee the roadmap for AI/ML applications, including the split of AI capabilities between edge devices and the central platform

• Build out a set of API services enabling customers to integrate platform data, alerts, and insights into their own applications

• Collaborate closely with the device engineering team to ensure seamless integration and co-development across interconnected systems

• Work alongside the customer-facing team (primarily based in North America) to translate feature requests into scalable platform solutions — providing what customers need, not just what they ask for

• Manage, mentor, and grow the platform team, with additional headcount planned for this year

• Make high-impact design decisions and bring in third-party technologies where appropriate to accelerate the platform roadmap

What We're Looking For

Our client is open on background but the ideal candidate will bring:

• Demonstrable experience working in an environment dealing with connected sensors and IoT devices and AWS-native architectures

• Experience leading or architecting a SaaS platform — whether as a tech lead, chief engineer, principal architect, or platform lead — with responsibility for design decisions and third-party technology selection

• Hands-on familiarity with cloud-native technologies including AWS, Kubernetes, Django, and React, plus a solid grasp of data storage topologies (RDS, time-series, NoSQL) and hot/warm/cold data layer concepts

• Understanding of IoT connectivity protocols (MQTT, AMQP, HTTPS), device provisioning and lifecycle management, and real-time streaming and analytics pipelines

• A strong understanding of platform scalability, performance engineering, design patterns, and API service design

• Familiarity with AI/ML application development on connected device data would be highly advantageous

• Strong collaboration skills — this role requires working across the platform team, device team, customer success, and sales functions

• Comfortable working in person: the Edinburgh office has a collaborative and flexible culture

• People leadership experience is beneficial but not essential — the ability to influence and make technical decisions is the priority

If this sounds like the right role for you, then please get in touch with Christina Hall for more information -