Head of Application Platform Engineering — Principal, Hands-On

HSBC; Kraków; On-site; PLN 367,911 - 551,862; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical care

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Home office setup reimbursement

Employee assistance program

Multisport card

Corporate events

Parking on site

Job summary

HSBC is seeking a Principal Engineer, Application Platforms to lead the Platform Engineering & Architecture function in Kraków. This hands-on leadership role requires delivering end-to-end platform outcomes, governing delivery, and driving the 80% application migration to the standard platform.

You will establish engineering standards, improve observability, and reduce operational risk while shaping a resilient, scalable platform for the wider technology organisation.

Qualifications

• Significant senior engineering leadership experience in platform engineering and/or large-scale hosting environments.
• Proven track record delivering complex tech change across multiple teams, including platform consolidation and migration programs.
• Strong governance, prioritisation, and delivery management practices in an engineering-led setting.
• Ability to define and embed engineering standards with measurable outcomes (reliability, quality, delivery).
• Experience in resilience engineering, operational risk management, and enterprise controls.
• Knowledge of observability practices (monitoring, logging, alerting) and associated operating models.

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering function for Application Platform Engineering, guiding strategy and day-to-day execution.
• Partner with Head of Application Platforms to own end-to-end delivery, controls, and outcomes.
• Establish governance, prioritisation, delivery cadence, and decision forums.
• Define and track engineering standards to improve quality, reliability, and consistency.
• Drive migration to the standard platform, targeting ~80% application migration.
• Consolidate six hosting platforms into a single standard platform to reduce complexity.
• Improve resilience and time-to-market via standard patterns and reusable capabilities.
• Ensure observability across platforms and migrated applications.
• Implement automated run controls to strengthen operational management.
• Measure and report delivery outcomes with transparent metrics and continuous improvement.

Skills

Platform leadership

Hands-on coding

Governance & delivery

Observability practices

Migration programs

Platform consolidation

Stakeholder management

Automation & run controls

Resilience engineering

Leadership in engineering

Tools

Policy-as-code

SLOs/SLAs

Job description

HSBC is seeking a Principal Engineer, Application Platforms to lead the Platform Engineering & Architecture function in Kraków. This hands-on leadership role requires delivering end-to-end platform outcomes, governing delivery, and driving the 80% application migration to the standard platform.

You will establish engineering standards, improve observability, and reduce operational risk while shaping a resilient, scalable platform for the wider technology organisation.