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 (inclusive of process and cost) 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 change management; incident management and problem management standards; and common service focused frameworks such as ITIL Version 3.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• 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, 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 SMEs 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.