Lead Platform Engineer

Barclays; New York (NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays is seeking an experienced engineering leader to build and run the Global Front Office (FO) engineering success function across New York, London, and APAC.

You will lead a team of engineers, drive platform roadmap influence with Quants/Strats, and deliver scalable Python tooling, AWS deployments, and AI/ML enablement. This role emphasizes collaboration, governance, and high‑quality software delivery.

Qualifications

• Strong Python engineering experience.
• Hands-on AWS experience: IAM, S3, Lambda, ECS/EKS.
• Proven collaboration with Quants/Front‑office engineering teams.
• Solid AI/ML concepts: inference, embeddings, RAG, evaluation.
• Strong debugging across cloud infra, containers, and pipelines.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management in high‑pressure FO environments.
• Experience leading a technical team or global engineering function.

Responsibilities

• Lead the global FO engineering success function across NY, London, and APAC users.
• Build trusted relationships with Quants and Strats and influence roadmap.
• Prioritize and manage global work intake by impact and urgency.
• Provide hands-on Python automation, tooling, and FO software.
• Guide secure and scalable AWS usage, debugging, deployments, networking, performance.
• Support AI/ML enablement for platform features and tools.
• Establish global support processes, docs, onboarding, and best practices.
• Mentor a small team of FO-focused engineers and enforce high standards.
• Ensure governance, model controls, and data privacy compliance.

Skills

Python engineering

AWS

Quants/FO teams

AI/ML concepts

Debugging

Leadership

Stakeholder mgmt

Communication

Tools

LiteLLM

MLflow

Databricks

SageMaker

Langfuse

Observe

Mem0

Docker

ECS/EKS

Job description

Salary / Rate Minimum: $220,000

Salary / Rate Maximum: $300,000

The minimum and maximum salary/rate information above includes only base salary or base hourly rate. It does not include any another type of compensation or benefits that may be available.

Key Responsibilities

1. Global Front‑Office Success Engineering Leadership

• Build and lead the global FO engineering success function across New York, London, and APAC users.
• Build trusted relationships with Quants and Strats worldwide, understanding differing desk‑specific needs.
• Prioritize and manage work intake globally based on business impact and urgency.
• Serve as the voice of FO users to influence platform roadmap and feature prioritization.

2. Hands-On Engineering & Troubleshooting

• Write high‑quality Python code for automation, integrations, internal utilities, and FO tooling.
• Diagnose complex issues across cloud (AWS), distributed systems, Python stacks, notebooks, model pipelines, and APIs.
• Deliver engineering solutions that reduce recurring FO friction and accelerate delivery.

3. AWS Engineering Support

• Guide global front‑office teams on secure and scalable usage of AWS services such as:
  S3, IAM, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, CloudWatch, Glue, and CDK/CloudFormation.
• Provide hands‑on help with debugging, deployment, permissions, networking, and performance.

4. AI/ML Enablement

• Help global FO teams onboard onto platform AI features such as inference gateways, embeddings, evaluation tools, and tracing.
• Provide guidance on AI/ML concepts:
  model inference, RAG, embeddings, vector stores, latency optimisation, guardrails.
• Support adoption of tools such as LiteLLM, MLflow, Langfuse, Mem0, Databricks, SageMaker, and Observe.

5. Developer Experience & Operational Excellence

• Establish global support processes, workflows, and standards.
• Identify patterns in recurring issues and partner with platform engineering to eliminate them via features or automation.
• Develop and maintain documentation, onboarding guides, and best practices tailored for FO developers.
• Drive proactive monitoring of systems impacting FO teams.

6. Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead and mentor a small team of engineers focused on FO success.
• Set strong engineering standards for code quality, reliability, and FO responsiveness.
• Promote a culture of collaboration, empathy, accountability, and excellence.

7. Governance & Risk Management

• Ensure all FO support and deployment workflows comply with governance, model controls, and data privacy requirements.
• Promote secure‑by‑default patterns across global FO usage.
• Help enforce model governance standards and audit requirements.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong Python engineering experience (backend, tooling, automation, debugging).
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS: IAM, S3, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, CloudWatch.
• Proven experience working with Quants, Strats, or front‑office engineering teams.
• Solid understanding of AI/ML concepts (inference, vector search, embeddings, RAG, evaluation).
• Strong debugging abilities across cloud infra, Python environments, containers, and pipelines.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills in high‑pressure FO environments.
• Experience leading a technical team or owning a global‑facing engineering function.

Desirable Skills

• Familiarity with tools such as LiteLLM, MLflow, Databricks, SageMaker, Langfuse, Observe, Mem0.
• Understanding of financial markets, derivatives, FO analytics workflows, or pricing/risk models.
• Exposure to model governance, compliance, and data control frameworks.
• Experience with Docker, ECS/EKS, and platform observability tooling.
• Experience improving developer productivity or reliability at scale.

Purpose of the role

To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues.

Accountabilities

• Development and delivery of high‑quality software solutions by using industry aligned programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Ensuring that code is scalable, maintainable, and optimized for performance.
• Cross‑functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define software requirements, devise solution strategies, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.
• Collaboration with peers, participate in code reviews, and promote a culture of code quality and knowledge sharing.
• Stay informed of industry technology trends and innovations and actively contribute to the organization’s technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.
• Adherence to secure coding practices to mitigate vulnerabilities, protect sensitive data, and ensure secure software solutions.
• Implementation of effective unit testing practices to ensure proper code design, readability, and reliability.

Director Expectations

• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub‑function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up‑to‑date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.