Platform Engineering Manager

NatWest Group; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

NatWest Group is seeking a Platform Engineering Manager to own and evolve our data ecosystem, guiding a high-performing squad to architect and maintain a robust platform for ingesting, managing, and leveraging data across business units.

You will mentor engineers, shape hiring, define the technical roadmap for the data platform with a focus on self-service, reliability, security, and seamless user experience, while aligning designs with business goals.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data mesh architectures and guiding platform teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and grow a platform engineering team; shape hiring strategy and foster ownership.

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

Strategic thinking

Communication

Data mesh knowledge

Tools

AWS

GCP

Kafka

Terraform

Crossplane

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Join us as a Platform Engineering Manager

• Identifying and solve engineering-wide challenges as they appear
• We'll look to you to deliver exceptionally high-quality work and empower engineers to make a big impact
• Investing in NatWest Boxed's overall platform architecture
• Ensuring the security of our systems and working practice

What you'll do

As a Platform Engineering Manager, you will take ownership of our data ecosystem, guiding a high-performing engineering squad to architect and maintain a robust platform that empowers every business unit to effectively ingest, manage, and leverage data for varied strategic requirements.

Day-to-day, you'll be:

• Leading, mentoring and growing a high-performing team of platform engineers, shaping our hiring strategy and fostering a culture of innovation and ownership
• Defining the strategic vision and technical roadmap for our data platform, focusing on self-service, reliability, scalability, security, and user experience
• Critically evaluating architectural proposals and technical designs from the team, ensuring alignment with long-term business goals, platform vision, architecture and security
• Championing engineering excellence by embedding best practices for self-service platform engineering, CI/CD, and SRE, while owning the operational health of our platform through SLOs
• Collaborating with Product, Architecture, Analytics and Security teams to deliver a secure, robust platform that enables all groups to easily manage data within defined standards
• Driving projects from inception to delivery, taking into consideration the needs of your customers whilst fitting into the wider Platform strategy
• Engaging with clients and vendors on integration patterns and implementation

The skills you'll need

We're looking for someone with proven experience leading, managing, and scaling high-performing data mesh architectures as well as the ability to connect technical architecture decisions directly to business outcomes; you understand the cost, risk, and revenue impact. It would be great if you had experience with FinTech / Banking and hands-on experience with programming languages such as Python or Go.

You’ll also have:

• A strong technical background in cloud-native technologies (e.g., AWS, GCP) and event streaming (Kafka).
• Deep understanding of modern platform engineering principles, including infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Crossplane), data streaming platforms, data transformation, observability (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry) and self-service platform design
• A strategic mindset with experience designing, building, and operating scalable, distributed systems.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences internal and external