Director of Engineering - Infrastructure

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined Zozo, operators of Zozotown, the leading fashion e-commerce platform in Japan. This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst, as we accelerate our vision and work together to transform the future of fashion shopping through AI and technology. 

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn't, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better choices and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper.

The Role

We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to join our Infrastructure tribe to lead Platform and IT at Lyst. These functions are responsible for the roadmaps that help the wider organisation to build a product that customers love, and we want you to deliver the infrastructure and security strategy that will achieve this.

You’ll be responsible for building out and executing roadmaps that deliver a cornerstone of our tech strategy - developing a platform that’s secure, stable, operable and compliant. You’ll work with the VP of Engineering for Data & Infrastructure to turn a strategic vision into scalable platform and security roadmaps, and run the 5-person Platform and IT squad structure that will make this a reality.

This will mean working with senior stakeholders in the wider company to lead on the rolling out and supporting of the infrastructure and tooling necessary to deliver the best development and deployment experience that makes security easy. You’ll be responsible for ensuring a fast, reliable experience for customers, serving millions of images and terabytes of data every day across multiple continents.

Responsibilities

Define and execute strategic roadmaps
Collaborate with the VP of Engineering for Data & Infrastructure as well as senior leadership to develop the long-term strategic roadmap for the platform, security infrastructure, and internal IT systems. Own cross-squad and cross-org communication to refine workstreams and set expectations via forward planning.

Deliver technical infrastructure leadership
Own the design, operation, and continuous improvement of the website platform’s foundational infrastructure, including deployment, CI/CD, observability, scalability, and reliability and lead the evaluation and implementation of new technologies that can improve platform performance, cost-efficiency, and developer productivity.

Implement security architecture and risk management
Oversee the security architecture of the platform, ensuring robust defences against evolving threats, developing compliance frameworks and working with engineering leadership to understand how security can be “by default” within the platform.

Cultivate team leadership and growth
Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team drawing on their experience of platform engineering and IT support. Foster a nurturing and independent environment that encourages autonomy, accountability, responsibility and delivery.

Within 3 months you’ll be

• Developing roadmaps with the VP of Engineering to deliver progress in the Platform, IT and Security functions of the tribe
• Line managing the 5-person Platform and IT squad structure to provide direct and indirect coaching and mentoring opportunities to help team members grow
• Working with the engineering leadership team to understand the needs of our tech roadmap and how to support the org
• Organising and participating in the squad ceremonies that turn the strategic plans into actionable, measurable progress
• Collaborating with stakeholders across the organization who can help guide on organizational needs and help set delivery expectations
• Contributing towards engineering culture through leadership and finding opportunities to give a voice to the work of your area

You’ll support the Infrastructure squads to

• Manage an AWS and Cloudflare platform that leverages EKS, RDS (PostgreSQL), ElastiCache (Redis) and OpenSearch Service to serve millions of customers every day
• Focus on providing a first-class development and deployment platform for our engineering teams that encourages ownership of infrastructure and cost through great tooling and documentation
• Be curious about evaluating new technologies and solutions, and being guided into when and how to apply them appropriately through the roadmap
• Support the platform through an on-call rota, and are encouraged to drive automation opportunities in response to incidents to reduce dependency
• Cultivate a DevOps mentality with the rest of our engineering chapter to encourage strong infrastructure ownership, feedback loops and a self-serve mentality
• Take a security-first approach, leveraging least-privilege and continuous improvement to understand our risk appetite and provide and progress appropriate controls
• Help engineering teams to measure application performance and delivering insights, metrics and relevant alerts to the engineering teams with ELK, Grafana and New Relic
• Develop and support the processes necessary to ensure smooth operation of internal IT that connect all members of Lyst with the tooling and services they need every day

Requirements

• Proven track record of turning organisational needs into actionable, day-to-day deliverables
• Ability to work with senior stakeholders and peers to develop strategic outcomes
• Knowledge of a complex cloud provider environment managed with infrastructure-as-code
• Proficient with Docker, Kubernetes, a CI/CD platform and a container orchestration system
• Experience of implementing and managing data and security compliance
• History of coaching and mentoring high-performance, autonomous teams
• Experience of incident management workflows and expectation management
• Proficient with project management software to help scope and refine roadmaps of work

Benefits

• Our Ways of Working: We all come into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays , with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.
• Time Off: In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
• Competitive Family Leave Package: This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
• Clothing Benefit: We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.
• Private Healthcare: Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.
• Training Allowance: We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
• Pension Scheme: Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
• Eye Tests and Vouchers: Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
• Cycle-to-Work Scheme: Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
• Transport Season Ticket Loan: Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
• Social Events: Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.