Responsibilities
- Treat every technology in the subdomain as a product — with users (product teams), a contract, a lifecycle, and an adoption story.
- Build self-service capabilities that teams can consume without tickets, without meetings, and without hand-holding.
- Define and enforce golden paths — the well-trodden, well-supported way to use each capability — while leaving room for edge cases to be handled deliberately.
- Invest in developer experience: clear contracts, examples, integration templates, documentation, and office-hours support rather than bespoke engagement.
- Measure adoption, reliability, and the cost per team — and make that visible to the organisation.
- Architect and evolve the current Base Technologies portfolio: Red Panda and Kafka for event streaming today, NATS under evaluation for tomorrow.
- Own the decision framework for adding new capabilities to the subdomain — what belongs here, what belongs in a product team's stack, when to build vs buy, and when to retire something.
- Plan for the next wave of shared capabilities as platform needs emerge — e.g. external API gateways, email / notification services, shared workflow or job-orchestration services, shared storage patterns.
- Resolve the existing technical debt: inconsistent operational patterns across Red Panda and Kafka, DR gaps, capacity management by gut-feel rather than telemetry, and a long tail of non-production-ready configuration from earlier adoption waves.
- Define and evangelise integration patterns — event-driven designs, schema governance, idempotency, observability hooks.
- Declarative, GitOps-style configuration for every capability the domain offers.
- Automation-first provisioning, patching, scaling, and DR — R&D does not operate production directly, so operational excellence has to be baked into the platform itself, not left to manual runbooks.
- Partner with the infrastructure team (who own the AKS fabric) to deploy your capabilities cleanly onto the cluster platform, and with the operations function on the live-service side.
- First-class observability for everything the subdomain runs — metrics, logs, traces, SLOs.
- Lead and mentor the subdomain squad — around a dozen engineers working alongside an embedded Engineering Lead.
- Own the overall quality of technical output from the squad — design standards, code review culture, test coverage, operational readiness — you set and uphold the bar.
- Work closely with your Program Manager to sequence and schedule delivery across the active portfolio.
- Collaborate closely with adjacent Domain Owners — databases, infrastructure, developer-tooling, and the product-side consumers of your platforms.
- Champion modern standards for messaging and platform capabilities (CloudEvents, schema registries, idempotency, exactly-once semantics where appropriate) without being fashion-driven.
- Own the Base Technologies roadmap — aligning it with Nexus platform priorities, cost targets, and customer requirements.
- Run credible evaluations of emerging technologies (NATS is the current example) — structured trade-off analysis, not vendor theatre.
- Contribute to broader platform strategy as part of the primary domain leadership group you'll belong to.
Requirements
- high agency
- a genuine self-starter who sees an open canvas and wants to put their own stamp on it
Team
Team size: around a dozen engineers. Structure: subdomain squad
