Data Platform Engineer

Job Description

Purpose of the role

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Accountabilities

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long-term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid-level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department's future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People 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..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

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.

Join us as a Data Platform Engineer and help make data platforms easier to build, operate and consume.

As one of the first permanent engineers in a new platform team, you will create the AWS foundations that power BPL's enterprise data platform. You'll build reusable cloud services, automated delivery pipelines, security controls and operational tooling that allow engineering teams to move faster without compromising reliability, governance or resilience.

Working alongside platform, data and security engineers, you'll turn common infrastructure requirements into reusable platform capabilities, reducing complexity for delivery teams and enabling a consistent, secure engineering experience across the organisation.

If you're passionate about platform engineering, infrastructure as code, automation and creating paved roads that other teams love to use, this is an opportunity to shape both the platform and the engineering culture from the start.

To be successful as a Data Platform Engineer, you must have the following essential skills;

Terraform Engineering & Infrastructure-as-Code Excellence

Demonstrable expertise in:

• Reusable module design
• Testing strategies (unit, integration and validation testing)
• State management
• Promotion between environments
• Code quality, versioning and maintainability
• Platform engineering best practices

CI/CD, Automation & GitOps

Excellent experience of building and evolving infrastructure delivery pipelines, including:

• GitHub Actions
• Automated testing
• Security controls in pipelines
• Policy checks
• Release automation
• GitOps operating models

AWS Platform Engineering

Hands-on AWS engineering with a focus on:

• IAM and security patterns
• Networking integration
• Storage and encryption
• Observability
• Resilience and operational readiness
• Automation and supportability

Some other highly valued skills may include;

Databricks on AWS

Experience with:

• Workspace deployment
• Databricks Terraform provider
• Identity integration
• Storage integration
• Network connectivity patterns

Platform Engineering / Internal Developer Platforms

Experience building:

• Self-service capabilities
• Golden paths
• Paved roads
• Reusable engineering patterns
• Internal platform products

Observability, Reliability & Operational Engineering

Experience with:

• Monitoring and alerting
• Operational telemetry
• Incident management
• Resilience testing
• Recovery automation
• Production support

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills

The successful candidate will be based in London. Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence expected.

Barclays' payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield's global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments' acceptance services provider to Barclays' clients for a minimum of ten years.

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.