Platform Manager

Job title : Platform Manager

The Role

• The Platform Manager is the operational engine of this platform. Reporting to the Platform Director, you will own the day-to-day delivery, health, and standards compliance of the entire engineering platform. You will lead the platform's engineering teams, run its operations, and be the single accountable owner for how well this platform performs, ships, and scales. This is a critical, high-ownership role for a leader who thrives in complexity and holds themselves and their teams to the highest standards.

What You'll Do

• Standards & Patterns —  Working closely with the Enterprise Architect and architecture team, translate architectural guidance into concrete engineering and delivery standards, patterns, and practices. Own their rollout, enforcement, and continuous improvement across all teams and contributors.
• DevSecOps Pipeline Ownership —  Oversee and actively participate in the design, implementation, and governance of world-class DevSecOps pipelines — ensuring every service ships through automated, security-gated pipelines with zero direct production access by any engineer.
• Team Leadership & Recruitment —  Recruit, onboard, orient, and lead the platform's key engineering roles — architects, cloud and database engineers, DevSecOps, security, and SRE. Build a high-performing, standards-compliant team and create the conditions for them to do their best work.
• SRE & Incident Management —  Own the platform's Site Reliability Engineering function end-to-end — defining and enforcing standards for rapid incident identification, triage, troubleshooting, and resolution. Design, build, and run a 24/7 Network & Security Operations Centre (NSOC) that ensures the platform is always visible, always monitored, and always recoverable.
• Observability —  Establish and enforce world-class observability standards across all platform services — ensuring every team maintains deep, consistent visibility into the behaviour and performance of their services from day one in production.
• Operational Excellence —  Coach engineering teams on standards adherence and delivery best practice. Track, baseline, and report on DORA metrics and platform KPIs — holding teams accountable to continuous improvement and ensuring the Platform Director has accurate, timely delivery intelligence at all times.
• Change Management —  Own the platform's change control process — including the Change Advisory Board (CAB), release gate approvals, and production promotion workflows. No change touches production without passing the bar.
• Security Ownership —  Own the platform's security posture across all engineering teams and workstreams. Working hand-in-hand with the Platform Manager (Security), ensure that security standards are properly defined, implemented, and strictly enforced at every layer — from pipeline to production.
• Cost & Capacity —  Own platform cloud cost stewardship — monitoring spend, eliminating waste, and reporting on efficiency. Work with architects to anticipate capacity requirements and ensure the platform can absorb growth before it is needed, not after.
• Dependency Management —  Identify, track, and resolve cross-team dependencies and blockers with urgency — protecting team velocity and ensuring no team is held up by another longer than is absolutely necessary.
• Partner & Contractor Onboarding —  Oversee the end-to-end onboarding of engineering partners and contractors — ensuring due diligence is complete, access is provisioned on a least-privilege basis with MFA enforced, and every contributor is oriented to platform standards before they write a single line of code.
• Executive Support —  Represent the platform in key leadership forums, including ExCo and board-level meetings when required. Translate platform delivery status into clear, confident executive narratives.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in backend development, microservices architecture, and distributed systems — you must be able to speak the language of every team you lead.
• Proven experience leading and scaling multi-disciplinary engineering teams across architecture, cloud infrastructure, DevSecOps, and SRE — with a track record of recruiting, developing, and holding high-performing engineers to the highest standards.
• Deep practical knowledge of DevSecOps pipeline design and governance — including CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitLab CI, or Jenkins), container security (Docker, Trivy, Falco, Snyk), and security gate implementation (SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets detection).
• Solid cloud infrastructure experience across AWS and/or Azure — including managed services, private networking, zero-trust architecture, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, and Bash).
• Hands-on familiarity with the core platform stack: microservices, containerisation (Docker), API gateways (Kong or equivalent), event-driven messaging (RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, or Amazon SQS), caching (Redis), and relational databases (PostgreSQL).
• Strong command of SRE principles and incident management — including NSOC design, on-call frameworks, observability tooling (centralised logging, metrics, distributed tracing), SLOs/SLAs, and post-incident review processes.
• Confident executive presence — able to represent the platform credibly at ExCo and board level and translate complex technical delivery into clear business narrative.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with CBN guidelines, PCI DSS, and data protection regulations applicable to financial services in African markets.
• Experience designing and operating a 24/7 NSOC or SOC in a regulated financial services environment.
• Working knowledge of cloud cost management tooling and FinOps practices.