Platform Desktop Engineering Manager

We tackle the most complex problems in quantitative finance, by bringing scientific clarity to financial complexity. From our London HQ, we unite world-class researchers and engineers in an environment that values deep exploration and methodical execution — because the best ideas take time to evolve. Together we’re building a world-class platform to amplify our teams’ most powerful ideas. As part of our engineering team, you’ll shape the platforms and tools that drive high-impact research – designing systems that scale, accelerate discovery and support innovation across the firm. Take the next step in your career.

The Platform Desktop Engineering team is a new team within Core Infrastructure, responsible for the platform desktop. As Platform Desktop Engineering Manager, you will build and lead the team, taking accountability for the availability, security and evolution of the platform desktop service. This is a hands-on management roles requiring strong technical knowledge of Linux environments. You will stay close to the build pipeline, provisioning tooling and security posture, enabling you to review technical decisions, assess risk and hold partner teams and vendors to account. The role had a broad remit, spanning image builds, provisioning, security, monitoring and hardware. You will establish the team’s standards and priorities from the ground up, protecting engineers’ focus and making clear decisions about scope. Working closely with Linux Engineering, Security and wider infrastructure teams, you will foster a collaborative environment where engineers are encouraged to challenge, contribute ideas and act on them. Key responsibilities of the role include: Hiring, onboarding and developing Platform Desktop Engineers, including objectives, feedback and career development Managing service performance, including availability, estate health, patching , provisioning and user experience Owning the support model, including service levels, request and incident management and escalation paths Balancing operational demands with planned engineering work and longer-term priorities Delivering the estate roadmap across image builds, provisioning tooling, automation and hardware refreshes Overseeing change management, communications and post-incident improvements Defining and reporting metrics that provide visbility of service performance and estate health Managing capacity, budget and hardware lifecycle across physical and virtual resources Working with Linux Engineering, Security, Identity, Tech Support and other partner teams to manage dependencies and escalations Supporting joiner, mover and leaver processes in partnership with HR Who are we looking for? The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience: Experience leading an infrastructure, platform or endpoint engineering team Strong hands-on Linux expertise, including package management, performance troubleshooting and log analysis Good understanding of CI/CD pipelines for OS image creation using tools such as Dagger, Packer, Jenkins or Bash Experience supporting bare metal and VM provisioning at scale, ideally using OpenStack and Ironic Strong understanding of enterprise security, including vulnerability and patch management Sound judgement, balancing security best practice with pragmatic risk-based decisions Understanding of hardware provisioning and lifecycle management, including diagnostics and vendor management Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence priorities across teams Experience owning and improving production services end to end Why join us? Highly competitive compensation plus annual discretionary bonus Lunch provided (via Just Eat for Business) and dedicated barista bar 30 days’ annual leave 9% company pension contributions Informal dress code and excellent work/life balance Comprehensive healthcare and life assurance Cycle-to-work scheme Monthly company events G-Research