Platform Engineering Manager - Platform Shared Services

Frontiers Media; Madrid; Presencial; EUR 90.000 - 120.000; Jornada completa

Ventajas ofrecidas por este puesto de trabajo

Office presence & collaboration

Wellbeing days

Volunteering days (up to 3)

Employee Assistance Programme

Learning & development

Descripción de la vacante

Frontiers is seeking a senior engineering leader to drive the IAM and Messaging workstreams within our shared services. You will oversee day-to-day operations, translate roadmaps into executable plans, and own the delivery outcomes for authentication and messaging platforms across a distributed system landscape.

In this role, you will mentor senior engineers, manage staffing and budgets, ensure reliability with SLAs/SLOs, and partner with Platform Product Management to align technical

Formación

• 4+ years direct management of engineering teams
• Proven delivery of backend/platform/infrastructure services
• Solid backend engineering and distributed systems background
• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and service reliability (SLAs/SLOs)
• Understanding of how internal teams operate as service providers
• Balanced focus on people management (~60%) and technical work (~40%)
• Experience with budget/resource planning
• Clear communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Professional-level English (spoken and written)

Responsabilidades

• Lead day-to-day operations across IAM and Messaging portfolios
• Translate roadmap into actionable engineering plans with the Platform PM
• Own team delivery for authentication, messaging, and related infrastructure
• Coordinate resources, manage risk, and deliver outcomes for dependent teams
• Guide senior engineers on technical direction and review architecture proposals
• Develop people through clear expectations and performance management
• Own reliability and operational excellence with SLAs/SLOs and incident management
• Identify and implement improvements to delivery efficiency and reliability
• Represent the team cross-functionally and manage senior leadership communication

Conocimientos

Management experience

Delivery track record

Technical depth

Reliability & delivery practices

People & delivery balance

Planning

Communication & judgement

English proficiency

Herramientas

Azure

Kubernetes (AKS)

.NET/C#

Descripción del empleo

About Frontiers At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet. We are one of the world’s largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers. Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organization at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society. To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video.

The Technical Context

You will lead delivery across the team's shared-service lines — today IAM and Messaging. IAM: OAuth 2.0 / OIDC (Ory Hydra), JWT authorization, fine-grained authz via a Permission API (Ory Keto), Azure APIM, OAuth client tooling, shared .NET libraries. Messaging: transactional/outreach email at scale (SendGrid, Mailgun), templating and A/B testing, deliverability tooling, and a central GDPR consent authority (Subscription Management). Core stack: C#/.NET services on Microsoft Azure + Kubernetes (AKS); event-driven with RabbitMQ and Kafka; SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch. Delivery & reliability: CI/CD, observability (New Relic, Grafana), SLAs/SLOs and incident management. Ways of working: Spec-Driven / AI-First Delivery (PRDs/SDDs in git, the Technology Framework as executable context, Cursor, MCP) — available to help the team deliver faster and more safely.

What You'll Do

• Lead the team day to day — oversee operations, resource allocation and task assignment across the IAM and Messaging portfolio.
• Turn roadmap into execution — translate the shared-services roadmap and portfolio objectives (owned with the Platform PM) into actionable engineering plans; ensure delivery aligns with department and wider engineering goals.
• Own team delivery — for authentication, messaging and related infrastructure: coordinate resources, manage risk, and deliver outcomes for the many teams that depend on these services.
• Partner with the Platform Product Manager — align roadmap priorities with technical feasibility, reliability and platform health; push back with technical reality where needed.
• Guide technical direction with your Senior Engineers — you don't need to be hands‑on daily, but you provide enough depth to steer decisions on authentication and messaging infrastructure and to review architecture and design proposals.
• Develop people — set clear expectations, give regular feedback, support career growth, and run performance management for the team.
• Own reliability & operational excellence at the team level — SLAs/SLOs, incident management, and blameless post‑incident follow‑through; protect the team from unbounded toil.
• Improve process — identify and implement improvements that increase delivery efficiency and reliability across the team and portfolio.
• Represent the team cross‑functionally — drive alignment with the engineering teams that consume shared services; escalati… lock and manage significant technical/delivery risks to senior leadership.

Requirements

• Management experience: minimum 4 + years directly managing engineering teams, in addition to prior hands‑on software engineering experience.
• Delivery track record: proven delivery of backend, platform, or infrastructure services; experience managing teams responsible for shared/platform services (authentication, messaging, APIs) strongly preferred.
• Technical depth (to steer, not to code daily): solid background in backend engineering and distributed systems — enough to guide decisions on authentication and messaging infrastructure and review design proposals with senior engineers.
• Reliability & delivery practices: working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and service reliability (SLAs/SLOs, incident management).
• Platform / shared‑services understanding: how internal engineering teams operate as service providers to the rest of the org.
• People & delivery balance: organised and outcome‑driven, comfortable balancing people management (~60%) with technical/business activities (~40%).
• Planning: budget/resource planning experience for a team.
• Communication & judgement: clear communicator across technical and non‑technical stakeholders; sound decision‑making and comfort resolving ambiguity.
• Language: Professional‑level English (spoken and written).

Nice to Have

• Hands‑on background with authentication/identity (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT) and/or messaging/event‑driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), and .NET/C# environments.
• Familiarity with GDPR / consent and security/compliance as part of the delivery bar.
• Experience leading a team through a CI/CD or platform migration.
• Interest in Spec‑Driven Development and enabling an AI‑First delivery workflow for the team (Cursor, MCP, the Technology Framework).
• Background in Scientific Publishing.

How We Measure Success in This Role

• Delivery: predictable, healthy throughput against the shared‑services roadmap; risks surfaced and managed early.
• Reliability: SLAs/SLOs met for owned services; incident trend and quality of post‑incident follow‑through.
• People: team health, retention, growth and clear performance management.
• Consumer outcomes: satisfaction/adoption from the engineering teams that depend on IAM and Messaging.
• Security & compliance: the team's output meets the Technology Framework bar (OAuth/JWT, GDPR consent).

Why This Role Is Exciting

You’ll lead the team behind two of Frontiers' highest‑leverage capabilities: get identity and messaging right, and every product team ships faster and safer. It's a rare mix of real people leadership, technical direction on interesting distributed systems, and platform‑as‑a‑product thinking — all in service of a mission that matters: making science open for everyone.

Benefits

• We prioritise office presence and emphasise in‑person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy
• Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance
• Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year
• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal & financial support)
• Learning & development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub

Equal opportunity statement

Frontiers actively embraces diversity and is a safe and welcoming workplace. Recruitment is free from discrimination – including based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. With employees from more than 50 different nations, our diversity creates vibrant teams and constantly challenges us to appreciate multiple perspectives.