Alex Omand

Engineering Manager · Platform Engineering · Developer Experience
alex@omand.uk • LinkedIn Download PDF

Profile

Engineering Manager specialising in platform engineering and developer experience. I lead teams that build the shared internal platforms a large engineering organisation quietly depends on: the foundations that make delivery faster, more reliable, and less frustrating. At Marks & Spencer I run Web Platform and Developer Services for the internal developer platform used by around 1,500 engineers.

I have managed technical and product teams for more than a decade. I stay close to architecture and technical trade-offs, but the larger job is leadership: coaching people, building trust, and keeping the work pointed at outcomes rather than activity. My product background pulls me into product direction and organisational strategy as much as delivery, and I prioritise with the usual platform tension in mind: what needs shipping now versus what keeps the platform healthy later. I treat AI as a platform capability in its own right: something to build into the workflows engineers already use, with evaluation, clear contracts, and enough control to trust it in real delivery.

Skills

Career History

Software Engineering Manager – Web Platform & Developer Services

Marks & Spencer · May 2025 – Present

• Lead 12 people across two platform teams, Web Platform and Developer Services, from mid-level through staff: internal engineers in the UK and third-party engineers in Europe, South Africa, and India.
• Reoriented Web Platform from reactive support to a clear mission and roadmap around developer experience, platform reach, quality, and reliability.
• Established the organisation's first developer-experience baseline and quantified pipeline failure at ~1.6 FTEs of engineering time lost per week; both now drive the Web Platform roadmap.
• Wrote the requirements and design for the Platform Orchestrator, a contract-based runtime where platform teams publish governed workflows to the portal, CLI, CI/CD, and AI clients; delivered a working PoC and validated the design with Microsoft solution architects.
• Built a RAG-based support assistant PoC, then parked it when analysis of 1,896 support messages showed it addressed only about a quarter of demand; redirected the investment into self-service routing and fixing the recurring platform causes.
• Own reliability and incident response for the web selling experience; led it through peak trading with zero revenue-impacting incidents, with a core team of three engineers.

Head of Product – Internal Developer Platform

Marks & Spencer · Oct 2023 – May 2025

• Led 7 platform product managers across a portfolio of 50+ engineers and a £14m budget: Web, Mobile, APIs (incl. GraphQL), Runtime, Events, Experimentation, and DevEx for ~1,500 engineers.
• Worked with engineering leadership to turn a broad platform portfolio into a multi-year strategy.
• Pushed adoption and standardisation work that reduced cognitive load for engineering teams.
• Made developer experience and engineering health metrics part of how platform success was judged.
• Secured funding to train and hire product managers with stronger platform expertise.

Senior Product Manager – Internal Developer Platform

Marks & Spencer · Jan 2020 – Oct 2023

• Held dual product and engineering management responsibility when the team had no dedicated Engineering Manager, covering team health, hiring, performance, and engineering culture alongside product leadership.
• Led internal runtime platforms and developer tooling, supporting multiple engineering teams and a multi-million pound platform budget.
• Shaped API and platform strategies around usability, security, and operability.
• Used measurement and experimentation to prioritise platform work and show whether it had landed.
• Improved DevEx through automation and self-service, reducing avoidable friction for engineers.

Senior Technical Project Manager – Core Technology Platforms

Product Madness · Mar 2018 – Jan 2020

• Managed technical teams across the core game platform, DevOps, and infrastructure, improving code reuse and delivery flow.

Tech & Project Management Career Progression

Marks & Spencer · May 2011 – Mar 2018

• Progressed from Business Analyst to Senior Technical Project Manager, delivering POS and payments projects and introducing automated build and test pipelines.

Education

• MSc Computer Science (Distinction) – University of Hertfordshire (2011)
• BEng (Hons) Aerospace Engineering with Astronautics – Kingston University (2007)

Professional Training & Certifications

• Certified Platform Engineering Practitioner – Aug 2025
• Certified Platform Engineering Professional – Aug 2025

Projects & Writing

• Flow: a SwiftUI iOS training app for live workout timing, HealthKit cardio review, and AI coaching suggestions that are validated before they can change a routine.
• The Cabin: a survival-horror text adventure in Python with terminal and web surfaces, a stateful world model, tests, and free-text AI input kept inside rules-based guardrails.