Platform Engineering Manager

About Frontiers
At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet.
We are one of the world's largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers.
Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organization at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society. To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video.
The Mission
At Frontiers, we are rewriting the rules of scientific publishing. Behind every product team sit theshared technical services the whole publishing platform depends on. Today these are Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Messaging (transactional email and GDPR-compliant consent) — examples of this kind of shared service, with more likely over time — owned by our Platform Shared Services team. We are looking for a Platform Engineering Manager to lead the team that builds and runs them.
You will own team delivery, technical direction (in partnership with your Senior Engineers), and the people development of a team of [5–8] engineers. These are high-blast-radius services consumed org-wide, so you'll balance shipping new capability with reliability, security and backward compatibility— treating the services as products for internal engineering customers. You'll form a delivery triad with the team's Platform Product Manager (who owns the What/Why) and your Senior Engineers (who drive the How).
The Technical Context
IAM:
OAuth 2.0 / OIDC (Ory Hydra), JWT authorization, fine-grained authz via a Permission API (Ory Keto), Azure APIM, OAuth client tooling, shared .NET libraries.
Messaging:
transactional/outreach email at scale (SendGrid, Mailgun), templating and A/B testing, deliverability tooling, and a central
GDPR consent authority
(Subscription Management).
Core stack:
C#/.NET services on Microsoft Azure + Kubernetes (AKS); event-driven with RabbitMQ and Kafka; SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch.
Delivery & reliability:
CI/CD, observability (New Relic, Grafana), SLAs/SLOs and incident management.
Ways of working:
Spec-Driven / AI-First Delivery (PRDs/SDDs in git, the Technology Framework as executable context, Cursor, MCP) — available to help the team deliver faster and more safely.
What You'll Do
Lead the team day to day— oversee operations, resource allocation and task assignment across the IAM and Messaging portfolio.
Turn roadmap into execution— translate the shared-services roadmap and portfolio objectives (owned with the Platform PM) into actionable engineering plans; ensure delivery aligns with department and wider engineering goals.
Own team delivery— for authentication, messaging and related infrastructure: coordinate resources, manage risk, and deliver outcomes for the many teams that depend on these services.
Partner with the Platform Product Manager— align roadmap priorities with technical feasibility, reliability and platform health; push back with technical reality where needed.
Guide technical direction with your Senior Engineers— you don't need to be hands?on daily, but you provide enough depth to steer decisions on authentication and messaging infrastructure and to review architecture and design proposals.
Develop people— set clear expectations, give regular feedback, support career growth, and run performance management for the team.
Own reliability & operational excellence at the team level— SLAs/SLOs, incident management, and blameless post-incident follow-through; protect the team from unbounded toil.
Improve process— identify and implement improvements that increase delivery efficiency and reliability across the team and portfolio.
Represent the team cross-functionally— drive alignment with the engineering teams that consume shared services; expand and manage significant technical/delivery risks to senior leadership.
Management experience: minimum 4+ years directly managing engineering teams, in addition to prior hands?on software engineering experience.
Delivery track record: proven delivery of backend, platform, or infrastructure services; experience managing teams responsible for shared/platform services (authentication, messaging, APIs) strongly preferred.
Technical depth (to steer, not to code daily): solid background in backend engineering and distributed systems— enough to guide decisions on authentication and messaging infrastructure and rev