Introduction to the Role

Are you ready to lead the creation of secure, scalable platform products that enable engineering teams to deliver software with greater speed and confidence? Can you turn DevSecOps strategy into practical capabilities that are secure by design, easy to adopt, and ready to scale across the enterprise?

As Platform & Forward Engineering Manager, you will lead the engineers who design and build our platform products and capabilities. Combining strategic leadership with hands-on technical guidance, you will shape secure software delivery, strengthen DevSecOps maturity, and ensure our platform evolves in response to enterprise needs, security trends, and emerging threats.

This role is approximately 70% strategic leadership and 30% hands-on technical guidance. You will work closely with the Product Manager, who owns product direction, priorities, and adoption outcomes, while you lead the technical strategy, architecture, security, and engineering execution required to deliver them.

Accountabilities

• Technical and People Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop Platform and Forward Engineers. Build a high-performing team with diverse backgrounds and strengthen technical, architectural, and security expertise across the organization.

• DevSecOps Strategy and Platform Roadmap: Define and evolve the DevSecOps strategy and technical platform roadmap in close partnership with the Product Manager.

• Security by Design: Ensure platform solutions and products follow security-by-design and least-privilege principles, embedding appropriate security controls into platform capabilities from the beginning.

• Golden Pipeline Security: Lead the evolution of security capabilities in Golden Pipelines, including SAST, DAST, SCA, software bills of materials, software supply-chain security, and protections against threats such as pipeline poisoning.

• Architecture and Engineering Governance: Review architectures, technical designs, and pull requests to ensure scalability, quality, resilience, and security across platform solutions.

• Platform Development: Guide the design and delivery of secure, scalable platform products and reusable capabilities that address enterprise engineering needs.

• Business and Platform Alignment: Drive alignment between business needs and platform capabilities, working with Product Management and key stakeholders to translate priorities into technically viable solutions.

• Adoption Enablement: Ensure platform solutions are ready to scale across multiple teams and business units. Provide the technical leadership required to support adoption across hundreds of teams and thousands of users.

• Engineering Capability Development: Mentor engineers and raise technical and security capability across the team, enabling senior engineers to lead complex initiatives and guide the development of other team members.

• Industry Trends and Emerging Threats: Remain current with developments in DevSecOps, cloud security, platform engineering, and software supply-chain security. Use relevant industry insights to guide the continued evolution of the platform.

• AI-Enabled Engineering: Drive AI as a core engineering and security capability. Guide teams in using AI responsibly to improve productivity, security analysis, platform quality, and delivery speed.

Essential Skills and Experience

• Proven experience leading, coaching, and developing engineers in a platform, cloud, DevOps, or comparable technical environment.
• Deep expertise in AWS, Terraform, and platform engineering.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, serverless architectures, and distributed systems.
• Advanced knowledge of DevSecOps practices, including:
  • Static application security testing
  • Dynamic application security testing
  • Software composition analysis
  • Software bills of materials
  • Software supply-chain security
  • Secure pipeline design and governance
• Strong understanding of cloud security, least privilege, and secure architecture patterns.
• Experience reviewing architectures, technical designs, and engineering work for scalability, quality, and security.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives at enterprise scale.
• Experience enabling platform adoption across large engineering communities, including hundreds of teams and thousands of users.
• Strong stakeholder-management and influencing skills.
• Ability to align security, engineering, product, and business objectives.
• Demonstrated ability to build high-performing teams whose members bring different backgrounds and expertise to a common goal.
• Ability to combine strategic leadership with credible, hands-on technical guidance.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience scaling platform adoption across large enterprises.
• Experience working across multiple cloud platforms.
• Experience defining security standards, controls, or frameworks.

What Success Looks Like

• The platform strategy delivers secure, scalable, and widely adopted solutions.
• Security is embedded by default across all platform capabilities.
• Engineering teams consistently follow DevSecOps best practices.
• The platform evolves in line with industry security trends and emerging threats.
• Security, engineering, product, and business objectives remain strongly aligned.

Why AstraZeneca

At AstraZeneca, technology and science come together to create meaningful impact for patients. You will work with engineers, architects, product leaders, security specialists, and business partners to simplify complexity and improve how software is delivered across the enterprise.

We value kindness alongside ambition and believe that how we deliver is as important as what we deliver. You will have the opportunity to explore modern platform technologies and AI capabilities, challenge established approaches, and influence how the organization builds software securely at scale.

This is an opportunity to build a high-performing engineering team and create platform capabilities that help colleagues move faster and more safely in support of patients.

Call to Action

If you are ready to lead the team that builds the future of secure software delivery at AstraZeneca, join us to shape the platform, strengthen DevSecOps at enterprise scale, and raise the standard for engineering excellence.