Head Data Integration Platform (80-100%)

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.

Thank you for applying to Vontobel. We will carefully review your application and will respond to you in a timely manner.

At Vontobel, we are an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability or gender identity.

We value the many voices within our teams and are committed to creating an environment where everyone who wants to be part of our performance culture can be themselves. It is based on mutual respect and zero tolerance for any form of discrimination.

If you have any questions you can contact us through our contact form.