Platform Architecture Lead in London

FactSet creates flexible, open data and software solutions for over 200,000 investment professionals worldwide, providing instant access to financial data and analytics that investors use to make crucial decisions. At FactSet, our values are the foundation of everything we do. They express how we act and operate, serve as a compass in our decision-making, and play a big role in how we treat each other, our clients, and our communities. We believe that the best ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time, and that curiosity is the key to anticipating our clients’ needs and exceeding their expectations.

The Platform Architecture team is responsible for unifying FactSet's developer infrastructure and core technologies — providing a coherent Internal Developer Platform and Platform as a Service to ensure engineering teams have access to the technology capabilities they need to provide world-class financial solutions to our clients in a way that is self-service, governed, and easy to consume. This team is responsible for identifying future evolutions and innovative revolutions of FactSet's core platform components in order to enable increased developer productivity, operational reliability, and to unlock new capabilities that accelerate delivery across all engineering teams or enable novel client-facing technologies.

All team members, and in particular this leadership role, have the opportunity to be exposed to the entire FactSet technology stack and every engineering team across the organization as they seek to understand and contribute to key architectural needs. The current focus of the team is on designing and delivering FactSet's Internal Developer Platform as a Platform as a Service — a unified, self-service platform encompassing governed CI/CD, container orchestration, managed platform services (compute, storage, databases, messaging, caching), developer portal, and observability. The goal is to consolidate fragmented internal tooling into a coherent platform experience and expand managed service offerings in a way that balances exceptional developer experience with the governance and compliance requirements of a regulated financial services firm.

The Platform Architect role involves guiding the team towards the top priority platform initiatives at FactSet, utilising a broad understanding of the internal technology landscape, developer needs, and current industry practices, as well as contributing to those projects directly. The successful candidate will ensure productive collaboration with a broad set of internal stakeholders across the SBUs to keep projects on track with the top priority needs and opportunities to deliver value.

Responsibilities:

• Leading architecture decisions for the Internal Developer Platform and overseeing the broad-impact projects of the team.
• Working on enterprise-wide initiatives to address platform architecture problems and opportunities — from developer experience through to production operations.
• Evaluating and selecting third-party products and open-source technologies (platform orchestrators, developer portals, infrastructure-as-code tooling) that contribute to the overall platform landscape.
• Defining, maturing, and promoting platform engineering best practices, reference architectures, and golden paths across the organization.
• Engaging in architecture reviews and consulting with teams across the organization to advise on platform adoption, infrastructure patterns, and service design — informing the projects of the Platform Architecture team to meet open needs that should be centrally delivered.
• Working with cloud engineering, SRE, and security teams to align architectural goals with reliability, cost efficiency, and compliance initiatives.
• Driving architectural governance through ADRs, design reviews, and federated review boards that scale decision-making without creating bottlenecks.

Required Skills:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science (or equivalent field).
• Extensive development and platform engineering experience with demonstrated performance as a highly technical contributor.
• A strong understanding of modern platform engineering, internal developer platforms, and DevOps practices at enterprise scale.
• Deep experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration — including cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, networking, and operational patterns at scale.
• Significant experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including infrastructure design, managed services, cost management, and landing zone architecture.
• Demonstrable insight into platform architectural directions that improve developer productivity, deployment velocity, and operational reliability.
• Breadth of knowledge across several of the following areas: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, service mesh, networking, identity/security, and managed data services.
• Motivated and capable of helping to construct and influence a broad agenda to improve the platform capabilities and options available to engineering teams across the enterprise.
• Strong communication skills for effectively working with a wide variety of stakeholders — from application developers to engineering leadership — across different teams at FactSet.

Desired:

• Exceptional ability to dive into new systems and designs to quickly understand the structure and provide meaningful evaluation, guidance, and identification of alternatives.
• Experience designing multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud platform strategies for large engineering organizations.
• Experience with CI/CD platform design (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, GitOps workflows) and deployment governance.
• Familiarity with developer portals and service catalogs (Backstage or equivalent).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and platform orchestration (Terraform, Crossplane, Helm).
• Understanding of zero-trust security models, identity frameworks (SPIFFE/SPIRE, OAuth2/JWT), and compliance automation.
• Experience operating in a regulated financial services environment.

FactSet (NYSE:FDS | NASDAQ:FDS) helps the financial community to see more, think bigger, and work better. Our digital platform and enterprise solutions deliver financial data, analytics, and open technology to more than 8,200 global clients, including over 200,000 individual users. Clients across the buy-side and sell-side, as well as wealth managers, private equity firms, and corporations, achieve more every day with our comprehensive and connected content, flexible next-generation workflow solutions, and client-centric specialized support. As a member of the S&P 500, we are committed to sustainable growth and have been recognized among the Best Places to Work in 2023 by Glassdoor as a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award winner. Learn more at www.factset.com and follow us on X and LinkedIn. At FactSet, we celebrate difference of thought, experience, and perspective. Qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to characteristics protected by law.