Head of Developer Platforms & Experience, SVP, SVP

Who we are looking for The Head of Developer Platforms & Experience leads the internal product organisation that designs, builds and operates the paved road for software delivery . This is the platform, common libraries, toolchain and automated control plane through which every engineer builds, tests, releases and evidences software. The mandate is to make the compliant path the fastest path — raising engineering velocity and quality while generating security and audit evidence as a byproduct of normal work. Success is measured not in tools shipped but in delivery outcomes across the firm: faster lead times, lower change-failure rates, demonstrably stronger controls, and materially cheaper enterprise-wide change — most consequentially, create the development velocity and agility that allows State Street to keep our platform secure in the age of Frontier AI security models, and forthcoming quantum cryptography challenges . This is a deeply technical leadership role . The successful candidate is a credible principal-level engineer who has personally built platforms at scale, and who will lead through technical authority and product discipline rather than positional mandate. They must be equally effective writing an architecture decision record, defending a standard to s k eptical business-unit engineering leads, implementing new platforms, and presenting adoption and performance metrics to the Senior Leadership. Why this role is important to us latform as product. Developers are customers, not captive users. You run DPX with a roadmap, SLOs, adoption targets and quarterly developer feedback — and you are accountable for adoption you have earned, not mandated. Paved road, not walled garden. The golden path is the fastest, cheapest, pre-approved way to ship. Teams may deviate through a time-boxed, registered waiver — and inherit the full compliance and support burden of doing so. You make the paved road so good that deviation is rarely rational. Compliance as code. Controls, segregation of duties, change records and audit evidence are produced automatically by the platform. Regulatory strength is engineered in, not inspected after. Serve the whole estate. Mainframe, vendor-package, analytics and quant developer populations receive proportionate standards and tooling. A platform that serves only greenfield services has failed. Own the common core . Build multi-language libraries to support core functionality like logging, monitoring, service registration and discovery, event publishing, observability and telemetry, authentication, and secrets management. Consolidate before adding. You will rationalise a fragmented tooling estate before building anything new and fund the function substantially from that consolidation. What you will be responsible for Platform strategy & delivery Own the DPX strategy, roadmap and delivery across all product areas; set and hold platform SLOs, treating the developer platform as a Tier 1 production service. Design and deliver golden paths — opinionated, pre-approved templates that take a service from scaffold to production with observability, secrets management, security scanning, artefact provenance and event-streaming integration wired in by default. Define and operate the single enterprise CI/CD and release-automation capability and lead the consolidation of the existing fragmented pipeline estate on a dated migration runway. Stand up and run the internal developer portal (service catalogue, scaffolding, golden-path discovery, documentation). Standards & governance Co-chair the Technology Standards Board (owned by Enterprise Architecture) and own the engineering recommendations it decides on — approved languages, frameworks, developer tooling, CI/CD, testing and cryptographic-library standards, and their lifecycle status (Adopt / Trial / Contain / Retire). Standards are owned and ratified by EA; you are the authoritative engineering voice that shapes them. Author and maintain the Technology Radar as the standing recommendation to the CTO ; drive disciplined retirement of end-of-life development technologies with named executive accountability. Operate the waiver process with transparency — exceptions visible, time-boxed and owned by accountable business-unit executives. Work within the governance boundary with Enterprise Architecture, which owns technology standards and chairs the TSB: architectural patterns and target state remain with EARB/SARB; any standard implying architectural change routes to EARB before ratification. Secure SDLC & Common Core Jointly own, with the CISO’s organisation , the Secure SDLC and Common Core engineering capability — pipeline security controls, artefact signing and provenance, SBOM generation, and automated audit-evidence production. Build and maintain the shared , multi-language common core libraries and abstraction layers that give the firm the development foundation to rapidly build and deploy secure , reliable applications. Establish an AI-assisted development tooling capability that has security guardrails agreed with Cyber Security , in coordination with the Data & AI organisation . Organisation & leadership Build, lead and develop a high- calibre developer platform organisation , substantially formed by consolidating and re-badging distributed platform and tooling teams, supplemented by targeted external hires. Instill product-management and agile discipline s across the function; grow developer platform product managers and DevEx researchers. Act as a senior technical leader and mentor across Global Technology, raising the engineering bar beyond DPX itself. Stakeholder leadership & influence Earn adoption from business-unit engineering leaders through demonstrated value, not mandate; translate platform capability into outcomes each stakeholder recognises . Partner closely with Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, Compute Platforms , Cloud Platforms, Production Engineering , the Data & AI organisation . Represent DPX and its business case to the CTO / CIO and technology audiences, including adoption economics, risk-reduction and consolidation savings. Education and preferred qualification Extensive, hands-on engineering career culminating in principal -engineer or senior platform-leadership roles, with demonstrable personal technical depth — not solely management tenure. Proven record building and operating developer platforms, internal developer portals, or platform-engineering functions at enterprise scale. Deep expertise across the modern delivery toolchain: CI/CD systems, container orchestration (Kubernetes / OpenShift), infrastructure-as-code, artefact management, and progressive delivery. Strong command of secure SDLC practice — SAST/DAST/SCA, secrets management, artefact signing and provenance, SBOM — and the ability to partner credibly with security leadership. Fluency in distributed systems and hybrid compute across cloud and on-premise ; familiarity with the operational reality of regulated, mission-critical environments. Demonstrated product-management and agile discipline applied to internal platforms (SLOs, roadmaps, adoption-driven prioritization ). A track record of earning engineering adoption through influence and demonstrated value across a large, federated, sometimes skeptical organization . Executive presence: able to shape technical standards credibly alongside senior engineers and Enterprise Architecture, and defend investment cases to senior leadership audiences with equal authority. Highly desirable Financial-services or comparably regulated experience, with working knowledge of the control and audit expectations that context imposes. Experience implementing and successfully rolling-out common core libraries to large development populations. Experience integrating AI-assisted development tooling into an enterprise SDLC with appropriate governance. Familiarity with observability stacks (e.g. Grafana LGTM), event-streaming platforms (e.g. Kafka / Confluent)