Technical Engineering Manager - Data Platform

Technologies we use

Expected

• Python
• Java
• Temporal
• Cadence
• Kafka
• PostgreSQL
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Terraform

About the project

We are hiring on behalf of our client – a global financial services organization recognized for its premium service, deep domain expertise, and strong technology-driven approach. The company partners with clients, helping them solve complex challenges across investor services and capital markets. Their culture is built on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and empowering individuals to contribute beyond their immediate role.

This is NOT outsourcing. You will be hired directly by our client.

As a Technical Engineering Manager, you will become the technical and people leader for the platform engineering team in Kraków, reporting to a Managing Director in the United States. You will lead the development of the platform’s non-AI foundation: its workflow orchestration engine, data-processing services, APIs, integration framework, PostgreSQL model, and reliability and governance capabilities.

This is an architecture-led player-coach position. You will not be expected to spend most of your time implementing regular development tickets. However, you must remain sufficiently close to the technology to lead system design, challenge architectural decisions, review critical solutions, and help engineers resolve the platform’s most difficult technical problems.

Working model: 3 days per week in the office

Your responsibilities

• Provide technical and people leadership to the platform engineering team in Kraków.
• Establish scalable engineering practices, architectural standards, and decision-making principles.
• Mentor engineers, support their professional development, and help build a strong permanent local team.
• Partner with senior technical leadership in the United States on platform direction, priorities, and delivery.
• Create an environment in which strong engineers can work independently while remaining aligned on architecture and product goals.
• Lead the architecture of the workflow orchestration layer built around Temporal.
• Guide the design of durable, idempotent, fault-tolerant, and observable data-processing workflows.
• Oversee the PostgreSQL data model supporting integration configuration, transformation versioning, execution history, and data lineage.
• Shape the architecture of REST and GraphQL APIs, core platform services, customer integrations, and source and destination connectors.
• Define patterns for retries, replay, recovery, workflow versioning, compensation, and partial-failure handling.
• Ensure reliable integration and clear separation between the deterministic platform layer and the product’s AI capabilities.
• Establish platform reliability practices, including SLAs and SLOs, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and disaster recovery.
• Guide the implementation of audit trails, immutable logging, access controls, data masking, and encryption.
• Ensure that sensitive financial data is processed securely and remains traceable throughout its lifecycle.
• Ensure the platform remains highly available, performant, secure, and cost-effective as it scales.
• Work with Cloud Engineering on infrastructure requirements, deployment architecture, and security posture.
• Work closely with AI Engineering, Product, Design, QA, and Cloud Engineering across Kraków and the United States.
• Translate evolving product and customer requirements into pragmatic technical decisions.
• Balance the 2027 pilot timeline with long-term enterprise architecture, reliability, and governance requirements.
• Help the team operate effectively in a fast-moving environment where requirements and organizational structures continue to evolve.
• Provide technical direction when the team encounters complex architectural or production problems.

Our requirements

• 7+ years of experience in software, backend, or platform engineering.
• 3+ years of technical leadership, team leadership, or engineering management experience.
• A track record of establishing engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and influencing technical roadmaps.
• Experience building a new product or platform, or leading a significant architectural transformation from an early stage.
• Ability to make pragmatic decisions in an environment with incomplete requirements and changing priorities.
• Strong engineering background in Python or Java.
• Production experience with Temporal or Cadence.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, asynchronous processing, and failure handling.
• Practical experience designing idempotent workflows, retries, compensation mechanisms, replay, and other durable-execution patterns.
• Experience designing REST APIs; GraphQL experience is strongly valued.
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and messaging technologies such as Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or Kinesis.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including data modeling, schema design, indexing, and query optimization.
• Experience building and operating production systems on Azure or AWS.
• Practical knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Experience with monitoring, observability, incident response, and production reliability.
• Understanding of high availability, disaster recovery, performance, and scalability.
• Experience contributing to an AI-enabled product or working closely with AI or machine-learning engineering teams.
• Familiarity with LLM integration patterns or agentic frameworks such as LangChain or Agno would be beneficial.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with highly technical engineers and senior international stakeholders.
• Willingness to travel internationally approximately once per quarter.

What we offer

• Private medical care.
• Life insurance.
• Confidential counselling and support for personal, family, financial, and legal matters.
• Professional training and support for relevant qualifications.
• A comprehensive wellbeing programme.
• Access to an online social-benefits platform.
• Social, sports, and integration events.
• A structured onboarding programme.
• One Culture Celebration Day and one Community Service Day in addition to the standard annual leave allowance.

Recruitment stages

• A call with Motife recruiter
• Technical discussions
• On-site meeting in Krakow
• Final leadership conversation

Ready to join?

This role is particularly suited to someone who enjoys solving difficult, ambiguous problems and wants to help build both a product and an engineering organization from an early stage.

You do not need to have followed a conventional career path or meet every preferred qualification. If you bring strong platform-engineering foundations, technical leadership experience, and the ability to operate effectively in a changing product environment, we encourage you to apply.

MOTIFE is coordinating the recruitment process. The selected candidate will be employed directly by our client.

Motife Sp. z o.o.

MOTIFE is a trusted partner for tech companies choosing Poland to build and grow their engineering and software development capabilities.

We help software companies, startups, fintechs, technology companies, and industry disruptors with their IT recruitment and, wherever necessary, advisory in setting up a presence in Poland and daily operations.

Our end-to-end support helps us build long-term relationships with new IT players, which means we can offer some of the most interesting career opportunities for skilled software and IT professionals like you.