Senior Manager Forward Deployed Engineer Platform Engineering.

Job description

Role & responsibilities People Leadership & Organization Development • Lead, coach, and develop a diverse team of platform engineers, setting clear objectives, providing timely feedback, and building sustainable succession and capability plans. • Own workforce planning, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, engagement, retention, and career development for the platform engineering organization. • Create an inclusive, accountable, and high-performing culture that encourages technical excellence, experimentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning. • Balance delivery priorities, team capacity, technical debt, and operational commitments while empowering leaders and engineers to make effective decisions. Platform Automation & Developer Enablement • Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support secure, repeatable, and automated application delivery across development, test, validation, and production environments. • Automate build, test, deployment, configuration, release, rollback, and environment provisioning processes to reduce manual effort and delivery risk. • Partner with engineering teams to integrate platform capabilities into sprint delivery, release planning, branching strategies, and deployment workflows. • Continuously improve pipeline reliability, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery practices. Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering • Provision, configure, and operate cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code, reusable templates, and automated governance controls. • Support containerized workloads, Kubernetes platforms, service configuration, secrets management, networking, storage, and runtime reliability. • Implement scalable cloud patterns for application hosting, integration, data services, identity, backup, disaster recovery, and environment lifecycle management. • Collaborate with architecture and platform teams to standardize cloud operating models, guardrails, reusable modules, and engineering accelerators. Reliability, Observability & Production Operations • Implement monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, dashboards, and service health indicators to improve visibility across applications and infrastructure. • Support incident response, root cause analysis, problem management, release validation, capacity planning, and operational readiness reviews. • Improve availability, performance, scalability, resiliency, backup, recovery, and service continuity across production platforms. • Define and track operational KPIs such as deployment success rate, incident trends, mean time to recovery, environment stability, and system performance. Secure Platform Engineering & Operational Excellence • Embed security scanning, dependency checks, secrets management, vulnerability remediation, policy enforcement, and compliance evidence into automated delivery workflows. • Partner with cybersecurity, privacy, quality, and architecture teams to implement secure software development lifecycle and cloud security practices. • Maintain audit-ready deployment records, configuration baselines, access controls, change evidence, release approvals, and validation artifacts where required. • Drive continuous improvement across automation quality, platform reliability, operational risk, technical debt, and cloud cost optimization. Collaboration, Developer Experience & Continuous Improvement • Work closely with software engineers, QA engineers, product teams, cybersecurity, platform teams, and operations teams to improve end-to-end software delivery. • Create reusable templates, documentation, playbooks, runbooks, and self-service capabilities that improve developer productivity and operational consistency. • Troubleshoot complex build, deployment, infrastructure, environment, access, networking, and performance issues across cloud and enterprise systems. • Mentor junior engineers and promote principled engineering practices across platform automation, scripting, release management, observability, and production support. External Engagement & Strategic Partnerships • Represent the platform engineering organization with strategic vendors, cloud providers, technology partners, industry forums, and relevant professional communities. • Establish productive external relationships to evaluate emerging capabilities, benchmark engineering practices, influence roadmaps, and accelerate responsible adoption of new technologies. • Lead vendor governance, service reviews, commercial and delivery discussions, risk escalation, and performance improvement in partnership with procurement and internal stakeholders. • Communicate platform strategy, operating model, investment needs, outcomes, and risks to senior leaders and global partners with clarity and credibility. Leading Through Ambiguity • Translate broad business outcomes and incomplete information into a coherent platform strategy, prioritized roadmap, measurable decisions, and executable plans. • Make timely, risk-informed decisions amid uncertainty, changing priorities, complex dependencies, and competing stakeholder expectations. • Create clarity for teams by defining decision principles, ownership, guardrails, success measures, and escalation paths while allowing plans to evolve as evidence emerges. • Navigate organizational complexity, constructively challenge assumptions, and align diverse stakeholders around pragmatic solutions and enterprise outcomes. Compliance, Security & Quality • Ensure infrastructure, pipelines, deployments, and operational processes comply with applicable enterprise security, privacy, quality, accessibility, and regulatory requirements. • Support GxP, Computer System Validation (CSV), GDPR, HIPAA, change management, and internal J&J technology standards where applicable. • Maintain traceability for releases, configuration changes, infrastructure updates, deployme