Head Data Integration Platform (80-100%)

About the job

Do you want to run the asynchronous integration backbone of a modern private bank — and still write code? For our Data & AI Platforms department in Zürich, we are looking for a hands-on Head Data Integration Platform: a player-coach who leads a compact senior team operating the bank's event streaming, messaging and file-transfer rails, turns them into a self-service platform other teams love to build on, and enables the retirement of our legacy integration layer.

What would your role be?

Lead a compact, senior engineering team that owns three integration lanes for the entire bank: event streaming (Kafka), transactional messaging (JMS/AMQ), and file transfer — internally through our self-built, event-driven delivery platform, externally through managed file transfer with banks, custodians and market infrastructure.

Stay hands-on: you design, review and regularly contribute code alongside your engineers — this is a player-coach role in a team where everyone builds.

Productize our in-house event-driven delivery platform: documentation, SLOs, shared ownership, observability and a roadmap that keeps it the front door for internal asynchronous integration.

Turn the rails into paved roads: self-service topic and queue provisioning, onboarding templates, partner file-exchange workflows and golden paths that let delivery teams integrate without waiting on tickets.

Evolve the platform deliberately: harden what runs today, reduce single-person dependencies, and shape the path of our streaming estate towards managed cloud services when capacity and regulation allow.

Own the integration guardrails and decision framework: workloads are routed by pattern — volume, latency, delivery guarantees, transactional behavior — not by habit or escalation, in close collaboration with architecture, security and compliance.

Build a resilient, T-shaped team: paired ownership per lane, a shared engineering substrate (OpenShift, GitOps, CI/CD, observability) and a service mindset towards the teams who build on your platform.

What are we looking for?

A hands-on engineering leader: you have led platform or infrastructure teams and you still ship code — and you want to keep it that way.

Deep, production-grade experience with Apache Kafka: cluster operations, schema management, consumer patterns, and honest judgement about what streaming is and is not good for.

Strong grasp of messaging semantics — delivery guarantees, ordering, transactionality, exactly-once versus at-least-once — and of secure file-transfer patterns in a regulated, partner-facing environment.

Solid platform engineering foundations: Kubernetes/OpenShift, GitOps, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability as daily tools, not buzzwords.

A platform-as-product mindset: you measure success in adoption, developer experience and golden-path usage, and you protect engineering capacity for platform work against pure ticket operations.

Experience running legacy and target platforms in parallel: keeping critical operations stable while migrating and decommissioning, ideally in financial services or another regulated industry.

A people leader for small senior teams: you coach, pair, reduce bus factors and grow specialists into T-shaped engineers — and you can retain strong builders by giving their work a future.

A clear communicator who can explain asynchronous integration to non-engineers, make trade-offs explicit, and push back on senior stakeholders with facts rather than volume.

Affinity for Artificial Intelligence and a willingness to embrace AI-enabled tools and ways of working.

Fluency in English; German is an advantage.

What do we offer?

Top Zurich location with collaboration spaces (including rooftop terraces) and free lunch.

Friendly, diverse team in an open-office space.

All the latest technology to help you excel and advance.

Agile environment in how we think, the way we work and our trust for each other.

Flat hierarchy with collaboration at all levels.

Campus feeling and a collaborative spirit.

We are looking for talented people, not just a CV that ticks all the boxes. Even if you do not have absolutely everything we have asked for, if this role sounds like a good fit for you, we encourage you to apply.

Why Vontobel?

At Vontobel, youarebuildingbetterfutures for ourclients and society, as well as for yourself. As a family-owned and publiclylistedcompanywithover 2,000 professionalsbased in 28 locationsglobally and headquartered in Zurich, we’recommitted to long-term thinking and sustainability.

Our diverse team valuesuniqueperspectives, and wehireindividualsdetermined to deliver in a dynamic and changingworld. Even ifyoudon’tmeet all the criteria, weencourageyou to applyifyou’reenthusiasticabout the role.

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