Senior Manager - Platform Engineering

M&T Bank is seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the strategy, development, and delivery of platforms that support modern software engineering. The role involves guiding the adoption of CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code practices while collaborating closely with various teams to ensure alignment with business goals and modern engineering standards.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the platform engineering strategy, roadmap, and long‑term vision aligned to organizational and technology goals
• Establish and evolve the internal developer offerings, including golden paths, paved-road standards, and self‑service capabilities
• Lead development and operation of core platform components including: CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation, Infrastructure as Code frameworks, Cloud and hybrid infrastructure foundations, Container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes), Observability and monitoring toolchains, Secret management, configuration management, and policy‑as‑code
• Ensure platforms are secure, resilient, scalable, and optimized for developer experience
• Champion DevOps, SRE, and automation-first approaches across engineering teams
• Reduce delivery friction by standardizing reusable patterns, templates, reference architectures, and automated deployment workflows
• Promote a You Build It, You Own It culture through platforms that simplify operational ownership for teams
• Collaborate closely with Architecture, Cybersecurity, and Cloud/Infrastructure Ops to ensure platforms adhere to enterprise architecture, security, and compliance frameworks
• Partner with product and application engineering teams to drive adoption, gather feedback, prioritize enhancements, and scale successful patterns
• Interface with senior business and technology leaders to communicate platform strategy, progress, and outcomes
• Implement and oversee reliability engineering practices including SLOs/SLIs, incident management, error budgets, and proactive quality measures
• Ensure effective monitoring, alerting, logging, and operational automation are embedded into platform capabilities
• Drive continuous improvement through data-driven insights, including developer experience KPIs and delivery performance metrics
• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing platform engineering organization composed of managers, team leads, and senior engineers
• Drive a team culture of innovation, accountability, inclusion, and continuous learning
• Manage budget, staffing plans, vendor partnerships, and resource allocation for platform initiatives
• Typically manages 20–50 team members through direct and indirect reports
• Responsible for performance management, talent development, staffing, and organizational design

Requirements:

• A combined minimum of 14 years' higher education and/or work experience, including 10 years of experience in engineering, platform/cloud engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure roles
• A minimum of 5 years experience leading engineering teams, including people management
• Strong technical expertise across: Cloud environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP), CI/CD tools (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, etc.), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation), Kubernetes or similar container orchestration platforms, Monitoring/observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to lead modernization initiatives and drive adoption of new engineering practices
• Strong executive communication, strategic thinking, decision making and cross‑functional influence
• Master's degree in a technical or business-related discipline
• Experience leading platform engineering in large-scale or regulated environments
• Background implementing FinOps practices and optimizing cloud cost models
• Working knowledge of SRE frameworks and operational excellence programs
• Experience with service mesh, API gateways, developer portals, or IDP frameworks (Backstage, Tanzu, etc.)
• Confidence in leading multiple teams often in different geographic locations and time zones