Technical Engineering Manager - Data Platform

Motife; Kraków; On-site; PLN 391,000 - 458,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical care

Life insurance

Counselling and support services

Wellbeing programme

Online social-benefits platform

Social, sports and integration events

Structured onboarding programme

Culture and Community Service days

Job summary

Motife is hiring a Technical Engineering Manager in Kraków to lead the platform engineering team. You will co-create architecture, guide engineering practices, and mentor engineers while collaborating with US leadership on strategic direction.

The role emphasizes hands-on architecture leadership with a strong focus on reliability, data pipelines, and scalable infrastructure in a dynamic financial-services context.

Qualifications

• At least 7 years of software/backend/platform engineering experience.
• At least 3 years in technical leadership or engineering management.
• Experience leading engineers while shaping system design and decisions.
• Track record of establishing engineering standards and roadmaps.
• Experience building new products/platforms or leading architectural transformations.
• Ability to make pragmatic decisions in evolving environments.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical and people leadership to the Kraków platform engineering team.
• Define scalable engineering practices and architectural standards.
• Mentor engineers and develop a strong local team.
• Collaborate with US leadership on platform direction and delivery.
• Lead architecture of the workflow orchestration layer built around Temporal.
• Shape REST and GraphQL APIs and core platform services.
• Ensure reliability, security, and governance across the platform.

Skills

Team leadership

Architectural thinking

Mentoring

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Python/Java

Temporal/Cadence

PostgreSQL

Azure/AWS

Kubernetes

Docker

REST/GraphQL

Terraform

Kafka

Job description

We are hiring on behalf of our client – a global financial services organization recognized for its premium service, deep domain expertise, and strong technology-driven approach. The company partners with clients, helping them solve complex challenges across investor services and capital markets. Their culture is built on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and empowering individuals to contribute beyond their immediate role.

As a Technical Engineering Manager, you will become the technical and people leader for the platform engineering team in Kraków, reporting to a Managing Director in the United States. You will lead the development of the platform’s non-AI foundation: its workflow orchestration engine, data-processing services, APIs, integration framework, PostgreSQL model, and reliability and governance capabilities.

This is an architecture-led player-coach position. You will not be expected to spend most of your time implementing regular development tickets. However, you must remain sufficiently close to the technology to lead system design, challenge architectural decisions, review critical solutions, and help engineers resolve the platform’s most difficult technical problems.

Key takeaways:

Stack: Python or Java, Temporal or Cadence, PostgreSQL, Azure or AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, REST, GraphQL, Terraform, Kafka or equivalent event-streaming technology

Salary: 35 000–41 000 PLN gross monthly, Contract of Employment (directly with the client)

Working model: 3 days per week in the office; eligible parents of children up to four years old may work from the office 2 days per week

Additional info: International team meetings approximately once per quarter, potentially involving 1-2 weeks of travel

Location: Krakow, Poland

Recruitment process:

1. A call with Motife recruiter
2. Technical discussions,
3. On-site meeting in Krakow,
4. Final leadership conversation

Responsibilities:

Technical and People Leadership

• Provide technical and people leadership to the platform engineering team in Kraków.
• Establish scalable engineering practices, architectural standards, and decision-making principles.
• Mentor engineers, support their professional development, and help build a strong permanent local team.
• Partner with senior technical leadership in the United States on platform direction, priorities, and delivery.
• Create an environment in which strong engineers can work independently while remaining aligned on architecture and product goals.

Workflow and Data Platform Architecture

• Lead the architecture of the workflow orchestration layer built around Temporal.
• Guide the design of durable, idempotent, fault-tolerant, and observable data-processing workflows.
• Oversee the PostgreSQL data model supporting integration configuration, transformation versioning, execution history, and data lineage.
• Shape the architecture of REST and GraphQL APIs, core platform services, customer integrations, and source and destination connectors.
• Define patterns for retries, replay, recovery, workflow versioning, compensation, and partial-failure handling.
• Ensure reliable integration and clear separation between the deterministic platform layer and the product’s AI capabilities.

Reliability, Security, and Governance

• Establish platform reliability practices, including SLAs and SLOs, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and disaster recovery.
• Guide the implementation of audit trails, immutable logging, access controls, data masking, and encryption.
• Ensure that sensitive financial data is processed securely and remains traceable throughout its lifecycle.
• Ensure the platform remains highly available, performant, secure, and cost-effective as it scales.
• Work with Cloud Engineering on infrastructure requirements, deployment architecture, and security posture.

Product Delivery and Collaboration

• Work closely with AI Engineering, Product, Design, QA, and Cloud Engineering across Kraków and the United States.
• Translate evolving product and customer requirements into pragmatic technical decisions.
• Balance the 2027 pilot timeline with long-term enterprise architecture, reliability, and governance requirements.
• Help the team operate effectively in a fast-moving environment where requirements and organizational structures continue to evolve.
• Provide technical direction when the team encounters complex architectural or production problems.

Requirements:

Engineering and Leadership Experience

• At least seven years of experience in software, backend, or platform engineering.
• At least three years of technical leadership, team leadership, or engineering management experience.
• Experience leading and developing engineers while remaining closely involved in system design and complex technical decisions.
• A track record of establishing engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and influencing technical roadmaps.
• Experience building a new product or platform, or leading a significant architectural transformation from an early stage.
• Ability to make pragmatic decisions in an environment with incomplete requirements and changing priorities.

Backend and Distributed Systems

• Strong engineering background in Python or Java.
• Production experience with Temporal or Cadence.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, asynchronous processing, and failure handling.
• Practical experience designing idempotent workflows, retries, compensation mechanisms, replay, and other durable-execution patterns.
• Experience designing REST APIs; GraphQL experience is strongly valued.
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and messaging technologies such as Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or Kinesis.

Data, Cloud, and Infrastructure

• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including data modeling, schema design, indexing, and query optimization.
• Experience building and operating production systems on Azure or AWS.
• Practical knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Experience with monitoring, observability, incident response, and production reliability.
• Understanding of high availability, disaster recovery, performance, and scalability.

AI-Enabled Product Experience

• Experience contributing to an AI-enabled product or working closely with AI or machine-learning engineering teams.
• Understanding of how AI components integrate with dependable backend and workflow services.
• Ability to discuss the evaluation, monitoring, governance, and operational risks of AI capabilities in production.
• Familiarity with LLM integration patterns or agentic frameworks such as LangChain or Agno would be beneficial.

Financial Data and Enterprise Governance

Experience in one or more of the following areas will be particularly valuable:

• Financial services, payments, investment data, insurance, or another regulated environment
• Sensitive financial-data processing
• Data integration, transformation, reconciliation, or connector platforms
• Data lineage, audit trails, immutable logging, or transformation versioning
• Multi-tenant enterprise SaaS architecture
• Event sourcing, CQRS, or saga patterns
• Encryption, tokenization, data masking, and role-based access controls
• Systems operating under strict SLAs, business-continuity, and disaster-recovery requirements

Communication and Working Model

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with highly technical engineers and senior international stakeholders.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across Engineering, AI, Product, Design, QA, and Cloud teams.
• Willingness to work from the Kraków office 3 days per week.
• Willingness to travel internationally approximately once per quarter.
• Existing right to work in Poland; visa and work-permit sponsorship is not available.

What we offer:

• Direct cooperation with highly experienced technical and product leaders in Poland and the United States.
• Private medical care.
• Life insurance.
• Confidential counselling and support for personal, family, financial, and legal matters.
• Professional training and support for relevant qualifications.
• A comprehensive wellbeing programme.
• Access to an online social-benefits platform.
• Social, sports, and integration events.
• A structured onboarding programme.
• One Culture Celebration Day and one Community Service Day in addition to the standard annual leave allowance.

Ready to join?

This role is particularly suited to someone who enjoys solving difficult, ambiguous problems and wants to help build both a product and an engineering organization from an early stage.

You do not need to have followed a conventional career path or meet every preferred qualification. If you bring strong platform-engineering foundations, technical leadership experience, and the ability to operate effectively in a changing product environment, we encourage you to apply.

MOTIFE is coordinating the recruitment process. The selected candidate will be employed directly by our client.