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.
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.
At Vontobel, you are building better futures for our clients and society, as well as for yourself. As a family-owned and publicly listed company with over 2,000 professionals based in 28 locations globally and headquartered in Zurich, we’re committed to long-term thinking and sustainability.
Our diverse team values unique perspectives, and we hire individuals determined to deliver in a dynamic and changing world. Even if you don’t meet all the criteria, we encourage you to apply if you’re enthusiastic about the role.
