Lead Platform Engineer

**Job Description** =================== **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. 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.