Lead Platform Engineer

Barclays•New York, NY

2d•$220,000 - $300,000

About The Position

The Lead Platform Engineer will design, develop, and improve software that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for customers and colleagues. The role leads a global front-office engineering success function supporting users across New York, London, and APAC, building relationships with Quants and Strats and prioritizing work according to business impact and urgency. It represents front-office user needs in platform roadmap and feature decisions. The position combines hands-on Python engineering and troubleshooting with guidance on secure, scalable AWS usage and enablement of AI/ML platform features. It establishes support processes, improves developer experience and operational excellence, mentors a small engineering team, and ensures workflows comply with governance, model-control, and data-privacy requirements. The role also carries senior leadership expectations, including advising senior management, influencing stakeholders, managing significant sub-function resources and policies, and fostering compliance and technical excellence.

Requirements

Strong Python engineering experience in backend development, tooling, automation, and debugging.
Hands-on expertise with AWS IAM, S3, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, and CloudWatch.
Proven experience working with Quants, Strats, or front-office engineering teams.
Solid understanding of AI/ML concepts, including inference, vector search, embeddings, RAG, and evaluation.
Strong debugging abilities across cloud infrastructure, Python environments, containers, and pipelines.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills in high-pressure front-office environments.
Experience leading a technical team or owning a global-facing engineering function.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with LiteLLM, MLflow, Databricks, SageMaker, Langfuse, Observe, or Mem0.
Understanding of financial markets, derivatives, front-office analytics workflows, or pricing and 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.

Responsibilities

Build and lead the global front-office engineering success function across New York, London, and APAC users.
Build trusted relationships with Quants and Strats worldwide and understand desk-specific needs.
Prioritize and manage global work intake based on business impact and urgency.
Represent front-office users to influence platform roadmaps and feature priorities.
Write Python code for automation, integrations, internal utilities, and front-office tooling.
Diagnose issues across AWS, distributed systems, Python stacks, notebooks, model pipelines, and APIs.
Deliver engineering solutions that reduce recurring front-office friction and accelerate delivery.
Guide front-office teams in secure, scalable use of AWS services, including debugging, deployment, permissions, networking, and performance.
Help front-office teams onboard to AI platform features and provide guidance on AI/ML concepts and tools.
Establish global support processes, workflows, and standards.
Identify recurring issues and partner with platform engineering to resolve them through features or automation.
Develop and maintain documentation, onboarding guides, and best practices for front-office developers.
Drive proactive monitoring of systems affecting front-office teams.
Lead and mentor a small team of engineers focused on front-office success.
Set engineering standards for code quality, reliability, and responsiveness; promote collaboration, empathy, accountability, and excellence.
Ensure support and deployment workflows comply with governance, model controls, and data privacy requirements.
Promote secure-by-default patterns and help enforce model governance standards and audit requirements.
Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees and contribute to function-wide strategic initiatives.
Manage, coordinate, and enable resourcing, budgeting, and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
Escalate policy or procedure breaches and foster compliance with applicable regulations.
Monitor and influence the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups on behalf of Barclays when appropriate.
Apply broad knowledge of how the function integrates with the business and use advanced analysis to solve complex or sensitive problems.
Make significant decisions or recommendations within the area, negotiate with senior stakeholders, serve as a key contact for clients and counterparts, and act as a spokesperson for the function and business division.
Demonstrate Barclays LEAD leadership behaviours and Barclays Values and Mindset.