Data Integration Platform Lead (80-100%)

• 20 August 2026 • 80 - 100% • Indefinite duration • Zürich Do you want to manage the asynchronous integration backbone of a modern private bank - while continuing to code? For our Data & AI Platforms department in Zurich, we are looking for an operational Data Integration Platform Lead: a player-coach who leads a compact senior team operating the bank's event streams, messaging, and file transfers, transforming them into a self-service platform that other teams love to use, and enabling the decommissioning of our legacy integration layer. What would your role be? Leading a compact senior engineering team that manages three integration paths for the entire bank: event streaming (Kafka), transactional messaging (JMS/AMQ), and file transfer - internally via our internally developed event delivery platform, and externally via managed file transfer with banks, custodians, and market infrastructures. Staying operational: you design, review, and regularly contribute to code alongside your engineers - it is a player-coach role in a team where everyone builds. Industrializing our internal event delivery platform: documentation, SLO, shared ownership, observability, and a roadmap that makes it the gateway for internal asynchronous integration. Transforming rails into paved roads: self-service provisioning of topics and queues, integration patterns, partner file exchange workflows, and golden paths that allow delivery teams to integrate without waiting for tickets. Evolving the platform deliberately: strengthening what works today, reducing single-person dependencies, and guiding the evolution of our streaming estate towards managed cloud services when capacity and regulation allow. Ensuring guardrails and the integration decision framework: workloads are routed according to a model - volume, latency, delivery guarantees, transactional behavior - and not by habit or escalation, in close collaboration with architecture, security, and compliance. Building a resilient T-shaped team: by-path pair ownership, a shared engineering substrate (OpenShift, GitOps, CI/CD, observability), and a service mindset towards the teams that rely on your platform. What are we looking for? An operational technical leader: you have led platform or infrastructure teams and you continue to code - and you want it to stay that way. Deep and production-quality experience with Apache Kafka: cluster operations, schema management, consumer patterns, and an honest judgment on what streaming is and is not good at doing. A solid understanding of messaging semantics - delivery guarantees, ordering, transactionality, exactly-once versus at-least-once - and secure file transfer patterns in a regulated and partner-oriented environment. Strong foundations in platform engineering: Kubernetes/OpenShift, GitOps, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability as daily tools, not buzzwords. A platform-as-a-product mentality: you measure success by adoption, developer experience, and the use of golden paths, and you protect engineering capacity for platform work against purely ticket-based operations. Experience managing parallel legacy and target platforms: maintaining the stability of critical operations while migrating and decommissioning, ideally in financial services or another regulated industry. A team leader for small senior teams: you coach, pair work, reduce single-person risk factors, and evolve specialists into T-shaped engineers - and you can retain strong builders by giving meaning to their work. A clear communicator capable of explaining asynchronous integration to non-engineers, making trade-offs explicit, and pushing back on senior stakeholders with facts rather than volume. An affinity for artificial intelligence and a willingness to adopt AI-assisted tools and working methods. Proficiency in English; German is an advantage. What do we offer? A prime location in Zurich with collaboration spaces (including rooftop terraces) and free lunch. A friendly and diverse team in an open office space. All the latest technology to help you excel and progress. An agile environment in our way of thinking, our way of working, and our mutual trust. A flat hierarchy with collaboration at all levels. A campus atmosphere and a collaborative spirit. We are looking for talented people, not just a CV that ticks all the boxes. Even if you do not possess absolutely everything we have asked for, if this role feels right for you, we encourage you to apply. Why Vontobel? At Vontobel, you build better futures for our clients and society, as well as for yourself. As a publicly listed family-owned company with over 2,000 professionals across 28 sites worldwide and a headquarters in Zurich, we are committed to long-term thinking and sustainability. Our diverse team values unique perspectives, and we recruit individuals determined to succeed in a dynamic and changing world. Even if you do not meet all the criteria, we encourage you to apply if you are enthusiastic about the position. We use cookies to display personalized content