Senior Engineering Manager (Customer Engagement Platforms)

Engineering Leadership

A high-growth digital financial services organisation is seeking an experienced engineering leader to lead the evolution of its backend platforms and services that power critical customer experiences, business operations, and future product innovation.

This is an opportunity to shape the technical direction of a large-scale backend ecosystem, lead high-performing engineering teams, and influence platform strategy within a modern fintech environment where scalability, resilience, security, and reliability are paramount.

The Opportunity:

You will lead engineering teams responsible for backend platforms, APIs, distributed services, and platform capabilities that support customer-facing products and core business functions.

Working closely with product, architecture, and business stakeholders, you will help drive technology decisions, improve engineering effectiveness, and ensure the successful delivery of strategic initiatives while developing a strong engineering culture.

This role is best suited to a leader who combines deep backend engineering expertise with strong people leadership and a passion for building scalable systems.

What You'll Do:

Lead Engineering Teams

• Build, mentor, and develop high-performing backend engineering teams and technical leaders.
• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• Support recruitment, workforce planning, talent development, and succession planning.
• Create an environment where engineers can perform at their best while continuously raising technical standards.

Drive Backend Platform Strategy

• Lead the design, evolution, and modernisation of distributed backend platforms and services.
• Partner with engineering teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and secure systems capable of supporting continued business growth.
• Influence architecture decisions and technical investments that improve platform performance, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
• Drive initiatives that reduce technical debt, improve developer productivity, and strengthen platform reliability.
• Advocate for engineering best practices across architecture, testing, observability, automation, and operational excellence.

Deliver Business Impact

• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to translate strategic priorities into technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• Balance delivery commitments with long-term platform sustainability and engineering quality.
• Identify and manage technical risks, dependencies, and operational challenges.
• Ensure engineering teams remain focused on delivering measurable customer and business value.

What We're Looking for:

Essential Experience

• Proven experience leading backend engineering teams in complex technology environments.
• Strong background designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems and service-oriented architectures.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native platforms and modern API ecosystems.
• Demonstrated success leading platform modernisation, architectural transformation, or large-scale technology initiatives.
• Track record of developing engineering leaders and building high-performing technical organisations.
• Strong understanding of the full software development lifecycle and modern engineering practices.

Technical Expertise

• Deep expertise in backend software engineering, distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous architectures, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of platform scalability, resilience, reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Experience working within modern backend technology ecosystems, including service-based architectures and cloud-native application development.
• Ability to engage confidently in architecture reviews, solution design discussions, and technical decision-making.

Digital/Tech Advantage

• Experience building platforms where reliability, security, performance, and availability are critical.
• Exposure to financial services, payments, digital banking, lending, wallets, or other highly regulated technology environments is advantageous.
• Understanding of operational resilience, risk management, and customer trust requirements within technology-led businesses.

What Success Looks Like:

• Highly effective backend engineering teams delivering scalable and reliable platform capabilities.
• Modernised backend architecture capable of supporting future growth and innovation.
• Strong engineering culture centred on technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Improved platform stability, performance, and delivery effectiveness.
• Trusted partnerships across engineering, product, and business teams.

Why This Role?

This is a career-defining opportunity to lead the backend engineering strategy of a growing fintech organisation. You'll help shape the platforms and services that underpin critical digital experiences while building exceptional engineering teams and influencing technical direction at scale.

For leaders passionate about distributed systems, platform engineering, backend architecture, and people development, this role offers meaningful impact, technical depth, and significant scope for influence.