Director, Head of Platform Engineering

Do you want your voice heard and your actions to count? Discover your opportunity with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world’s leading financial groups. Across the globe, we’re 150,000 colleagues, striving to make a difference for every client, organization, and community we serve. We stand for our values, building long-term relationships, serving society, and fostering shared and sustainable growth for a better world.

With a vision to be the world’s most trusted financial group, it’s part of our culture to put people first, listen to new and diverse ideas and collaborate toward greater innovation, speed and agility. This means investing in talent, technologies, and tools that empower you to own your career. Join MUFG, where being inspired is expected and making a meaningful impact is rewarded.

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

The Head of Platform Engineering is accountable for defining and executing the Platform Engineering strategy, leading the engineering and maintenance of operationally scalable, sustainable and secure platform infrastructure. The role holder will work collaboratively with colleagues in EMEA and across the globe to lead, design and implement a platform engineering model that balances governance, innovation and business/technology productivity. MUFG are seeking a transformation leader to advance scalable platform strategies that unify database, cloud, and storage technologies, driving efficiency and optimization through Site Reliability Engineering.

The successful individual will standardise these environments, enabling application teams to deploy efficiently and to ensure business applications are hosted on high performing infrastructure platforms. The role holder will be accountable for launching and promoting Platform Engineering offerings to MUFG business lines including communications, education and service readiness. They will own and lead the investment planning of Platform Engineering related projects and programme measuring the optimization of the underlying infrastructure platform and effectiveness of these services delivered to the business.

The role holder will own and manage the cost of Platform Engineering technologies and associated budget, licensing and vendor relationships to ensure cost efficiency, optimisation and return on investment. The Head of Platform Engineering is a leadership position and an integral part of the Digital Engineering Solutions and Services Leadership team. They will have a heavy focus on Infrastructure product enablement, working within an agile environment to empower Developers and promote a DevOps culture of continuous improvement, automation.

This is a crucial position leading the development of CI/CD pipelines, creating the foundational operating system for modern app and software engineering teams.

NUMBER OF DIRECT REPORTS

Circa 9

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Planning & Strategy

Develop and execute a comprehensive Platform Engineering strategy, vision defining objectives, ensuring alignment with enterprise, digital transformation, and business objectives. Define and deliver the platform engineering roadmap, balancing innovation, stability, scalability, and security (including DevSecOps), and incorporating emerging technologies such as generative AI and automated infrastructure provisioning supporting the organisational goals to modernise, reduce technology legacy debt, reduce technology and cyber risk.

Lead the development and promotion of self-service platforms and CI/CD pipelines to ensure secure, automated and frequent software delivery, enhancing developer velocity and operational efficiency. Accountable for providing environment management and control. Own and govern the lifecycle, stability, and compliance of all non-production and production technology environments, ensuring controlled, secure, and optimised usage aligned to business demand, risk standards, and platform strategy.

Define and enforce environment strategy, implement strict access control and segregation policies ensuring environment readiness with release management timeline. Provide leadership and insight on future Platform Engineering and Product technologies and adoption of these across multiple regions and business lines to support the ongoing modernisation of the function and stay ahead of platform advancements.

Own and establish the framework for the Platform Engineering team, ensuring they align with Digital Engineering Service and Solutions department and technology business strategy. Own and manage cost and feasibility while planning and delivering Platform Engineering services. Own and manage the Platform Engineering budget, licensing and vendor relationships to ensure cost efficiency, optimisation and return on investment.

Identify opportunities and implement strategies for efficiency enhancement, functionalities and service quality improvement, whilst adopting technology advancements where possible. Identify and evangelize new use cases and business opportunities enabled by engineering the platform. Ensure relationships with EMEA Technology functions and business clients are actively managed to fully deliver to business requirements.

• Operational Excellence, Platform Management and Governance

Work with Head of Digital Engineering Services and Solutions to deliver a reliable, sustainable, scalable and efficient operating model by leveraging best practices. Accountable for building and implementing Platform Engineering ecosystem that is robust, secure and resilient. Accountable for the end to end life cycle of all assigned Platform Engineering products.

Manage successful platform and product upgrades, technical debt and ensure adherence to best practice. Accountable for the tools, systems and processes required to deliver a cost-effective delivery function within EMEA. Accountable for resolving platform, database, storage and cloud escalations with autonomy and experience to make final decision on prioritisation, resourcing and design configurations.

Accountable for the platform design consistency across platforms, site reliability engineering, database, storage and cloud products and workflows. Accountable for ensuring that sufficient capacity is available to accommodate expected growth in all managed Platform Engineering platforms and products. Responsible for ensuring Platform Engineering Infrastructure is highly available, reliable and performant. Accountable for resolving escalations and providing SME technical escalation for core Platform, Site Reliability Engineering, Build and Release, Cloud, Storage and Database technologies.

• Governance

Own and oversee the health, performance and operational integrity of platform, site reliability, database, storage and cloud infrastructure technical support team. Identify key risks within the Platform Engineering function, assessing and mitigating those risks in accordance with the appropriate risk management framework. Ensure accurate reporting of all KRI/KPIs for the Platform Engineering Function, systems and tooling.

Ensure the Platform Engineering Function operates in a controlled way in accordance with standard procedures by adhering to related security and compliance procedures. In conjunction with EMEA Technology Risk, Security and Control, ensure that all regulatory requirements are fully complied with, including DORA assessments and appropriate defences and controls are in place to deal with all cyber risks.

• Project / Change

Accountable for complex, large scale Platform Engineering and Infrastructure Platform Implementations, ensuring quality, security and compliance. Responsible for the definition, documentation and safe technical execution of projects, working closely with the allocated Programme / Project Manager. Actively participating in all phases of the project.

Analyse accuracy of technical demands, work in progress, take action to ensure targets are met within safety and quality procedures, including hand-over to business and operational supports teams where appropriate. Provide effective investigation and technical resolutions for any issues that may occur as part of the project lifecycle. Investigate potential and actual service problems that may arise from implementation and recommend solutions. Follow formal procedures to plan and test proposed solutions.

Manage the technical delivery of projects within the agreed technical scope, cost and timescale across Bank and Securities. Provide specialized technical guidance, establish technical delivery goals and set reasonable delivery timeframes. Interpret relevant regulatory, requirements and security, design and technical best practices and translate these to business aligned Digital Engineering Services and Solutions programme requirements.

• Leadership, Culture and People Management

Accountable for people leadership across the Platform Engineering Function, ensuring that the team have the appropriate capabilities to be successful in their roles. Accountable for development of team with a strong focus on building future capabilities. Lead and champion MUFG’s inclusive, diverse, and values-led culture while fostering a growth mindset to embrace new technologies, industry advancements, and innovative use cases.

Actively manage performance, develop talent, identify key positions and persons and create sustainable success plans. Ensure appropriate training is in place to fulfil current and future skill requirements. Lead and promote a dynamic, delivery driven culture that works alongside business units to provide responsive resolutions and value driven solutions.

Build and nurture strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including business teams, to promote collaboration, understand industry’s best practices, and influence positive change across the organization. Lead and support location strategies prescribed from MUFG and enable transitions seamlessly.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Essential:

• Proven experience of leading Technology Infrastructure Platform, Site Reliability Engineering and Build and Release teams within Financial Services and agile platform and product working environments.
• Extensive experience in Platform Engineering technology, in a leadership role within a global organisation, managing a diverse technology team across multiple time zones and regions within a 24/7 production environment.
• Strong experience working within agile frameworks to deliver iterative platform improvements.
• Extensive product management and user centric experience, driving the treatment of internal platforms as products to drive adoption of internal tools.
• Proven experience of creation extensive product and platform strategy and roadmaps and articulation of these to business line and senior stakeholders.
• Highly skilled platform engineer with a comprehensive background platform and systems engineering technologies, to lead the team.
• Demonstrable experience of senior business stakeholder management and relevant management reporting. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to bridge the gap between technology and the business and to engage and influence stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Strong Infrastructure delivery background with evidence of successful technical delivery across multiple workstreams within the platform engineering space.
• Extensive experience in managing the technical delivery for multiple workstreams with broad scope, ambiguity, and high degree of difficulty.
• Possessing high level of analytical ability where problems are typically unusual and difficult.
• Ability to maintain a working knowledge of platform engineering elements.
• Ability to coach team members and stakeholders through technical knowledge transfer and constructive feedback to address issues ranging from maintenance and performance to high visibility issues impacting manage users.
• Experience in working in a high-pressure environment to deliver first class services.
• Familiar with the specific standards associated with an IT practitioner’s current role: e.g. Health and safety standards; change management; incident management and problem management standards; and common service focused frameworks such as ITIL Version 3.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Functional / Technical Competencies:

Essential

• Experience in leading technical and non-technical SMEs within Site Reliability, Storage, Platform, Cloud and Database environments.
• CI/CD Knowledge with experience building CI/CD workflows and managing release engineering platforms.
• Experience of designing and implementing solutions with the following technologies: Linux, Windows, MSSQL, Oracle, Azure, OCI, AWS, VMWare, Nutanix, Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, MongoDB, Snowflake, SAP Sybase, Dell EMC Powerstore, Dell EMC Isilon and Rubrik.
• Strong knowledge of public cloud, containerisation and Orchestration.
• Wide range of platform engineering technical skills to be able to bring together technical team in the production of a clear, achievable, cost-effective and supportable design.
• Can create agreed technical plans for others to follow, documenting actions required for simple to complex problems, confirms correct functionality, supervising other SME’s where required.
• Turning business problems into optimal technical designs, aligning user needs with systems requirements and organisational goals.
• Must be able to represent Infrastructure with credibility whilst guiding on the best technical solutions, tailoring business requirements to meet best practice and our technical standards.
• Planning own work and the work of others (including third parties) to ensure delivery to time and cost.
• Experience of supplier and third-party risk management.
• Solid analytical/problem-solving skills with capability to identify solutions to unusual and complex problems.
• Experience leading large platform engineering projects and teams.
• Experience with complex platform engineering environments and advanced trouble shooting.
• Strong proficiency in public cloud and containerisation.
• Understanding of various project management frameworks, methodologies and principles e.g. Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban etc.
• Experience in project and development methodologies.
• Experience planning and prioritising multiple work streams in response to rapidly developing and changing portfolios.

Education / Qualifications:

Essential

• Degree educated and / or recent technology focused qualifications with industry experience.
• Excellent general knowledge of IT Infrastructure (hardware, software, database, networking and cloud technologies).

Preferred:

• An ITIL qualification preferably Foundation at version 3 or above.

PERSONAL REQUIREMENTS

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to bridge the gap between technical terms and executives, articulating the platform’s return on investment in business terms, driving adoption through high trust internal partnerships. A proactive, motivated approach with a product mindset. A creative and innovative approach to work driving automation and implementing security by default. The ability to articulate and implement the vision/strategy for the Digital Engineering Services and Solutions department aligning platform strategy with business goals.

We are open to considering flexible working requests in line with organisational requirements. MUFG is committed to embracing diversity and building an inclusive culture where all employees are valued, respected and their opinions count. We support the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion in recruitment and employment, and oppose all forms of discrimination on the grounds of age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy and maternity, race, gender reassignment, religion or belief and marriage or civil partnership. We make our recruitment decisions in a non-discriminatory manner in accordance with our commitment to identifying the right skills for the right role and our obligations under the law.