Senior Manager Forward Deployed Engineer Platform Engineering.

Role & responsibilities

People Leadership & Organization Development

• Lead, coach, and develop a diverse team of platform engineers, setting clear objectives, providing timely feedback, and building sustainable succession and capability plans.
• Own workforce planning, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, engagement, retention, and career development for the platform engineering organization.
• Create an inclusive, accountable, and high-performing culture that encourages technical excellence, experimentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning.
• Balance delivery priorities, team capacity, technical debt, and operational commitments while empowering leaders and engineers to make effective decisions.

Platform Automation & Developer Enablement

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support secure, repeatable, and automated application delivery across development, test, validation, and production environments.
• Automate build, test, deployment, configuration, release, rollback, and environment provisioning processes to reduce manual effort and delivery risk.
• Partner with engineering teams to integrate platform capabilities into sprint delivery, release planning, branching strategies, and deployment workflows.
• Continuously improve pipeline reliability, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery practices.

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• Provision, configure, and operate cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code, reusable templates, and automated governance controls.
• Support containerized workloads, Kubernetes platforms, service configuration, secrets management, networking, storage, and runtime reliability.
• Implement scalable cloud patterns for application hosting, integration, data services, identity, backup, disaster recovery, and environment lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with architecture and platform teams to standardize cloud operating models, guardrails, reusable modules, and engineering accelerators.

Reliability, Observability & Production Operations

• Implement monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, dashboards, and service health indicators to improve visibility across applications and infrastructure.
• Support incident response, root cause analysis, problem management, release validation, capacity planning, and operational readiness reviews.
• Improve availability, performance, scalability, resiliency, backup, recovery, and service continuity across production platforms.
• Define and track operational KPIs such as deployment success rate, incident trends, mean time to recovery, environment stability, and system performance.

Secure Platform Engineering & Operational Excellence

• Embed security scanning, dependency checks, secrets management, vulnerability remediation, policy enforcement, and compliance evidence into automated delivery workflows.
• Partner with cybersecurity, privacy, quality, and architecture teams to implement secure software development lifecycle and cloud security practices.
• Maintain audit-ready deployment records, configuration baselines, access controls, change evidence, release approvals, and validation artifacts where required.
• Drive continuous improvement across automation quality, platform reliability, operational risk, technical debt, and cloud cost optimization.

Collaboration, Developer Experience & Continuous Improvement

• Work closely with software engineers, QA engineers, product teams, cybersecurity, platform teams, and operations teams to improve end-to-end software delivery.
• Create reusable templates, documentation, playbooks, runbooks, and self-service capabilities that improve developer productivity and operational consistency.
• Troubleshoot complex build, deployment, infrastructure, environment, access, networking, and performance issues across cloud and enterprise systems.
• Mentor junior engineers and promote principled engineering practices across platform automation, scripting, release management, observability, and production support.

External Engagement & Strategic Partnerships

• Represent the platform engineering organization with strategic vendors, cloud providers, technology partners, industry forums, and relevant professional communities.
• Establish productive external relationships to evaluate emerging capabilities, benchmark engineering practices, influence roadmaps, and accelerate responsible adoption of new technologies.
• Lead vendor governance, service reviews, commercial and delivery discussions, risk escalation, and performance improvement in partnership with procurement and internal stakeholders.
• Communicate platform strategy, operating model, investment needs, outcomes, and risks to senior leaders and global partners with clarity and credibility.

Leading Through Ambiguity

• Translate broad business outcomes and incomplete information into a coherent platform strategy, prioritized roadmap, measurable decisions, and executable plans.
• Make timely, risk-informed decisions amid uncertainty, changing priorities, complex dependencies, and competing stakeholder expectations.
• Create clarity for teams by defining decision principles, ownership, guardrails, success measures, and escalation paths while allowing plans to evolve as evidence emerges.
• Navigate organizational complexity, constructively challenge assumptions, and align diverse stakeholders around pragmatic solutions and enterprise outcomes.

Compliance, Security & Quality

• Ensure infrastructure, pipelines, deployments, and operational processes comply with applicable enterprise security, privacy, quality, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
• Support GxP, Computer System Validation (CSV), GDPR, HIPAA, change management, and internal J&J technology standards where applicable.
• Maintain traceability for releases, configuration changes, infrastructure updates, deployment approvals, incident records, and operational controls.
• Promote secure, reliable, and responsible engineering practices across cloud, application, data, and AI-enabled technology platforms.

Required Qualifications Education

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Master's Degree preferred.

Experience

• 15+ years of experience in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, site reliability engineering, release engineering, infrastructure automation, or software delivery enablement, including 5+ years in people leadership or engineering management roles.
• Demonstrated success building, coaching, and retaining high-performing engineering teams and managing performance, capability development, succession, and workforce planning.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated deployments, and environment provisioning across enterprise applications.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP, including compute, networking, identity, storage, monitoring, security, and managed services.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, configuration management, scripting, observability platforms, incident management, and production support.
• Experience with secure platform engineering practices, automated security scans, vulnerability remediation, access control, audit evidence, and regulated delivery practices.
• Experience managing strategic vendors or external technology partners and influencing senior, global, and cross-functional stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, frame complex problems, make risk-informed decisions, and establish direction in evolving enterprise environments.
• Experience in Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, Life Sciences, or other regulated industries preferred.

Technical Skills

Platform Delivery & Release Engineering

Cloud & Infrastructure as Code

Containers, Kubernetes & Platforms

Observability & Secure Engineering

• Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions / Jenkins
• Service catalog, software templates, golden paths
• Build and release pipelines
• Release, rollback, and change automation
• Azure / AWS / GCP cloud platforms
• Terraform / OpenTofu / Pulumi / Crossplane
• Bicep / ARM / CloudFormation
• Cloud networking, identity, storage, compute
• Configuration, backup, recovery, environment lifecycle
• Docker and container runtime concepts
• Kubernetes / AKS / EKS / GKE
• Helm / Kustomize / GitOps
• Argo CD / Flux continuous delivery
• API gateways, service mesh, platform operations
• Prometheus / Grafana / ELK / Splunk
• OpenTelemetry monitoring, logging, tracing
• Vault / cloud secrets management
• OPA / Kyverno / policy-as-code
• Incident, problem, and change management

Preferred candidate profile

• Experience supporting Clinical Development, R&D, Medical Affairs, Regulatory, enterprise data platforms, or internal productivity applications in a regulated environment.
• Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, container registries, artifact repositories, and observability tooling.
• Experience implementing secure platform controls, policy-as-code, vulnerability management, secrets management, cloud security posture, and compliance automation.
• Relevant certifications in Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, platform engineering, cybersecurity, site reliability engineering, or cloud architecture.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical risks, operational trade-offs, deployment options, and reliability improvements to diverse stakeholders.