Head Data Integration Platform (80-100%)

What would your role be?

• Lead a compact, senior engineering team that owns three integration lanes for the entire bank: event streaming (Kafka), transactional messaging (JMS/AMQ), and file transfer — internally through our self-built, event-driven delivery platform, externally through managed file transfer with banks, custodians and market infrastructure.  

• Stay hands-on: you design, review and regularly contribute code alongside your engineers — this is a player-coach role in a team where everyone builds.  

• Productize our in-house event-driven delivery platform: documentation, SLOs, shared ownership, observability and a roadmap that keeps it the front door for internal asynchronous integration.  

• Turn the rails into paved roads: self-service topic and queue provisioning, onboarding templates, partner file-exchange workflows and golden paths that let delivery teams integrate without waiting on tickets.  

• Evolve the platform deliberately: harden what runs today, reduce single-person dependencies, and shape the path of our streaming estate towards managed cloud services when capacity and regulation allow.  

• Own the integration guardrails and decision framework: workloads are routed by pattern — volume, latency, delivery guarantees, transactional behavior — not by habit or escalation, in close collaboration with architecture, security and compliance.  

• Build a resilient, T-shaped team: paired ownership per lane, a shared engineering substrate (OpenShift, GitOps, CI/CD, observability) and a service mindset towards the teams who build on your platform. 

What are we looking for?

• A hands-on engineering leader: you have led platform or infrastructure teams and you still ship code — and you want to keep it that way.  

• Deep, production-grade experience with Apache Kafka: cluster operations, schema management, consumer patterns, and honest judgement about what streaming is and is not good for.  

• Strong grasp of messaging semantics — delivery guarantees, ordering, transactionality, exactly-once versus at-least-once — and of secure file-transfer patterns in a regulated, partner-facing environment.

• Solid platform engineering foundations: Kubernetes/OpenShift, GitOps, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability as daily tools, not buzzwords.  

• A platform-as-product mindset: you measure success in adoption, developer experience and golden-path usage, and you protect engineering capacity for platform work against pure ticket operations.  

• Experience running legacy and target platforms in parallel: keeping critical operations stable while migrating and decommissioning, ideally in financial services or another regulated industry.  

• A people leader for small senior teams: you coach, pair, reduce bus factors and grow specialists into T-shaped engineers — and you can retain strong builders by giving their work a future.  

• A clear communicator who can explain asynchronous integration to non-engineers, make trade-offs explicit, and push back on senior stakeholders with facts rather than volume.  

• Affinity for Artificial Intelligence and a willingness to embrace AI-enabled tools and ways of working.  

• Fluency in English; German is an advantage. 

What do we offer?  

• Top Zurich location with collaboration spaces (including rooftop terraces) and free lunch. 

• Friendly, diverse team in an open-office space. 

• All the latest technology to help you excel and advance. 

• Agile environment in how we think, the way we work and our trust for each other. 

• Flat hierarchy with collaboration at all levels. 

• Campus feeling and a collaborative spirit. 

We are looking for talented people, not just a CV that ticks all the boxes. Even if you do not have absolutely everything we have asked for, if this role sounds like a good fit for you, we encourage you to apply.