Head of Research & Editorial

About Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering (platformengineering.org) is home to the world's largest community of platform engineers. Through PlatformCon, one of the world's largest conferences dedicated to platform engineering, we bring together more than 50,000 engineers, technology leaders, and decision-makers every year to share ideas, showcase innovation, and shape the future of internal developer platforms.

Alongside our events, we run a university, a newsletter read by hundreds of thousands of engineers, a growing YouTube channel, and Weave Intelligence, our research arm: the analyst practice behind the State of Platform Engineering report, market guides on the platform engineering reference architecture, and a growing set of data products on how the agentic enterprise is actually being built.

About the Role

We're looking for a Head of Research & Editorial to lead Weave Intelligence and own what we say about the industry.

This is the role that owns Platform Engineering's intellectual agenda. Everything we publish across every channel starts with a thesis about where platform engineering, internal developer platforms and agentic software development are going. Today that thesis lives in the heads of our founders. You will make it a practice: a research agenda, an editorial calendar, a standard for what counts as evidence, and a team that turns it into reports, guides, articles, courses and video that the market reads first.

You'll be a named analyst, not a manager of analysts. You will publish under your own byline, take briefings from vendors, sit on our analyst desk at PlatformCon and at KubeCon, re:Invent and Google Cloud Next, and represent Weave in the press. We want you to become one of the voices the industry associates with platform engineering.

You'll also lead the content team that already exists and works: a content operations lead who runs the engine and manages our designers, a narratives and quality lead who holds the bar on every piece, and a video producer who is building our channel. The production engine already exists. Your job is to decide where it points, raise the intellectual and editorial bar, and spend meaningful time doing the research and writing yourself

What you'll do

• Own the house thesis on platform engineering, PE++ and the agentic enterprise, and keep it ahead of the market.

• Run a quarterly theme calendar that every report, article, webinar, course and video hangs off, and make sure content, events and sales are telling the same story.

• Set the split between net-new thought leadership backed by our own data and rapid-response analysis of what the market is discussing, and decide which topics deserve which.

• Lead the Weave Intelligence analyst practice: research agenda, methodology standards, editorial ownership of the State of Platform Engineering and State of AI & Platform Engineering reports, market guides, and the vendor briefings program.

• Apply and defend our firewall: sponsors buy distribution and association, never conclusions; methodology is published before results; sponsored and syndicated work is always labeled.

• Publish regularly under your own name, and take the analyst chair at our events and at the industry majors we attend.

• Take vendor and enterprise briefings, and turn them into a structured view of the vendor landscape that feeds our reference architecture and our research.

• Lead and develop the content team: a content PM, a narratives and QA lead, a video producer, and through them our brand designers.

• Build relationships with other media houses, analyst firms and independent voices for co-published research, syndication and joint formats.

• Work with our founders on their public positioning, so that the strongest ideas in the company reach the stage and the page.

What you'll bring

• 6+ years in roles where your job was to understand a technology market and say something about it that held up: industry analyst, editor or lead writer at a technical publication, content or product marketing lead who shaped a category, or developer advocacy lead with a strategic remit.

• Real depth in platform engineering, developer tooling, cloud infrastructure or the adoption of AI in software development. You can hold your own with a staff engineer and a CTO in the same conversation.

• A body of published work under your own name, and a view on where the industry is going that you can defend with evidence.

• Narrative judgment: you know the difference between a topic and a thesis, and between something that is true and something that is worth saying now.

• Editorial rigor. You have run methodology, sourcing and fact-checking on work where being wrong had consequences.

• Experience leading a small team of writers, researchers or producers, and making them better rather than louder.

• Comfort in public: on stage, on camera, in a briefing room with a vendor's leadership team.

• Operating discipline: calendars, standards and a cadence that ships.

• Exceptional written and spoken English

• Willingness to travel a few times per year for events and offsites.

Nice to have

• Experience inside an analyst firm, or on the receiving end of one as a vendor.

• A track record of building something recognized as a source: a report people cite, a newsletter people forward, a format people copy.

• Familiarity with survey design and quantitative research methods.

• Existing relationships across the cloud native and developer tooling ecosystem.

• Hands-on engineering or platform background earlier in your career.

• A practical view on where AI helps and hurts research and editorial work.

• Experience working in a startup or scale-up, and with remote, globally distributed teams.

Why join us?

Most analyst jobs ask you to describe a market someone else built. This one asks you to shape one. Platform engineering is a discipline that our community defined, and the agentic enterprise is being defined right now. You'd be doing that work with direct access to the people building the world's most interesting internal developer platforms, a community of hundreds of thousands who already trust us, and a team that can turn an idea into a report, a course, a stage talk and a video in weeks.

There is no legacy research franchise to protect and no house style to inherit. If you want a role where your judgment about what matters becomes what the industry reads, this is that role.