Brown Brothers Harriman

Head of Platform Engineering

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At BBH, Partnership is more than a form of ownership—it’s our approach to business and relationships. We know that supporting your professional and personal goals is the best way to help our clients and advance our business. We take that responsibility seriously. With a 200-year legacy and a shared passion for what’s next, this is the right place to build a fulfilling career.

We are looking for Head of Platform Engineering

The Head of Platform Engineering is one of the most critical foundational hires on our team. You'll own the non-AI core of the platform - the workflow orchestration engine, data processing layer, API services, and the infrastructure that makes everything reliable at scale. You'll lead and grow the platform engineering team, set technical standards, and define the architecture that underpins how financial services firms create and execute their data integrations and transformations.

This is a player-coach role. In the near term you'll be deeply hands-on - making architecture decisions, writing code, and establishing the patterns the team will build on. As the team grows, your focus shifts increasingly to technical leadership, and cross-functional alignment with AI Engineering, Design, and Product.

The platform you build is what makes our product trustworthy to enterprise financial services customers. Audit trails, high performance, data lineage, fault tolerance, and governance are not features - they are the foundation.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

  • Lead and mentor the platform engineering team; establish coding standards, architectural patterns, and engineering practices that scale

  • Own the technical roadmap for platform engineering, aligned with product goals and customer requirements

  • Recruit and grow the team as the company scales

  • Partner with the Head of AI Engineering to ensure the AI layer integrates cleanly with platform services

Workflow & Data Architecture

  • Design and own the workflow orchestration layer using Temporal - the engine that drives how integrations and transformations are created, managed, and executed

  • Build and evolve the core data processing pipeline - idempotent, fault-tolerant, and fully observable

  • Design the Postgres data model supporting integration configuration, transformation versioning, execution history, and lineage tracking

Platform Development

  • Build and maintain core platform services - REST and GraphQL APIs, integration framework, and the connector layer that links customer source and destination systems

  • Design and implement the audit trail and immutable logging infrastructure that enterprise customers require

  • Establish reliability practices: SLA definitions, monitoring, alerting, and incident response

Scalability & Governance

  • Ensure all platform systems are highly available, performant, and cost-effective at scale

  • Build the governance layer - access controls, data masking, encryption at rest and in transit - that makes the platform enterprise-grade

  • Work with the Cloud Engineer on infrastructure needs, deployment architecture, and security posture

Requirements

Experience

  • 7+ years software or platform engineering; 3+ years in technical leadership roles

  • Player-coach track record - has led teams while remaining hands-on technically

Technical Skills

  • Strong Python or Java proficiency

  • Production experience with Temporal or Cadence

  • Distributed systems and microservices at scale

  • Azure (primary) or AWS

  • PostgreSQL - data modeling, schema design, query optimization

  • Kubernetes and Docker

  • REST and GraphQL API design

  • Infrastructure as Code familiarity (Terraform)

Financial Services Data Processing (Highly Valued)

  • Experience building systems that handle sensitive financial data at scale

  • Understanding of data lineage, audit trails, and immutable logging

  • Familiarity with event sourcing and CQRS patterns

  • Data encryption at rest and in transit, tokenization, data masking

  • Building systems with strict SLAs, disaster recovery, and business continuity requirements

Practices

  • Cloud/SaaS - has built and operated multi-user production systems in cloud environments

  • Active user of AI coding assistants in engineering workflow

Nice to Have

  • Kafka or event streaming (Azure Service Bus, Kinesis)

  • Multi-tenant SaaS architecture

  • Data reconciliation or financial transaction processing background

  • Familiarity with LLM integration patterns or agentic frameworks (Agno, LangChain) - understanding how an AI layer sits above platform services

  • Real-time data streaming in financial services contexts

We value diverse experiences. We value diverse experiences and transferrable skillsets. If your career hasn’t followed a traditional path, includes alternative experiences, or doesn’t meet every qualification or skill listed in the job description, please do go ahead and apply.

About BBH:

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) is a premier global financial services firm, known for premium service, specialist expertise, technology solutions and partnership approach to client management. Across Investor Services and Capital Partners, we work with an enviable roster of sophisticated clients who make BBH their first call when they are tackling their hardest challenges. Delivering for our clients and each other energizes us.

We believe that how we do our work is just as important as what we do. We are relentless problem solvers who know our best ideas come from collective debate and development—so we are never possessive about our ideas. Every day we come together as a diverse community of smart and caring people to deliver exceptional service and expert advice—creating success that lasts. No matter where you sit in the organization, everyone is empowered to contribute their ideas. BBHers can pick up the phone and call any colleague, and they are happy to help. Expanding your impact beyond your daily role is part of how we operate as trusted partners to one another.

We believe stability is a competitive advantage, but being stable means having the knowledge, skill, and discipline to evolve, often—pushing the boundaries of innovation. As a private partnership, every investment we make is in the relationships, technologies, products and development we believe are in the long-term interests of our clients and our people. Our long-tenured leaders are experts in their areas and are actively involved in the day-to day business, taking the time to provide guidance and mentoring to build the next generation of BBHers. Because we know, our success begins with yours.

Go to BBH.com to learn more about our rewards and benefits, philanthropy, approach to sustainability or how we support you to thrive personally, physically and financially.