Head of Platform

🌍 PagoNxt Payments | ✨ Your talent drives our future

PagoNxt Payments is Santander Group’s global payments platform, focused on providing tailored financial infrastructure for companies, banks, and fintechs — both inside and outside the Santander ecosystem. 

With operations in over 10 countries, our mission is clear: to simplify payments and empower businesses through secure, flexible, data-driven technology. 

We operate on a cloud-native architecture designed to scale and adapt to the needs of global organizations. Our platform supports international transactions, FX, multi-currency accounts, regulatory compliance, and fraud prevention — all under a unified approach. 

PagoNxt Payments combines the agility of a fintech with the reliability of a global bank. With teams across Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, the UK, and Germany, we are building the future of payments at global scale. 

✨ If you want to be part of the next generation of financial solutions — this is the place.

Imagine your future. Care for your career. Simplify your journey. 

This means you’ll have the opportunity to build impactful solutions, grow with real development opportunities, and thrive in a culture that values well-being, inclusion, and clarity. 

We combine flexibility, autonomy, and global collaboration — so you can focus on what matters, connect with purpose, and shape what’s next. 

You’ll find space to grow, real opportunities to lead, and a culture where everyone belongs and contributes. 

Are you ready to be a Nxter? 

✅ What we’re looking for

As Head of Platform, you will be accountable for the vision, delivery, and evolution of the Platform product that enables engineering teams to safely, efficiently, and autonomously deliver customer-facing services from development through production.

The Platform organization provides shared infrastructure, tooling, and processes that span the full software delivery lifecycle. It acts as an enabler, not a bottleneck—while also serving as a transversal enforcement point for architecture, security, reliability, and engineering best practices across the company.

This is a senior leadership role combining product mindset, deep technical credibility, and organizational leadership, critical to scaling a regulated fintech environment.

📌 What you’ll do

1. Platform Strategy & Product Ownership

• Define and own the Platform strategy and roadmap aligned with company technology and business goals.


• Treat the Platform as an internal product, with clear value propositions, roadmaps, service levels, and adoption metrics.


• Balance enablement and governance: empower squads while enforcing architectural, security, and operational standards.


• Act as a key contributor to company-wide technology strategy alongside Architecture, Engineering, Security, and Product leadership.
   

2. Organizational Leadership

• Lead multiple Platform teams and initiatives, including:




• Infrastructure & Shared Services (cloud, networking, data stores, API management, etc.).


• SDLC & Developer Experience (golden paths, quality gates, QA tooling, developer documentation and information systems).


• DevOps & Automation (CI/CD pipelines, release tooling, environment automation).


• Security-by-design initiatives in close collaboration with the BISO and CyberSecurity teams.




• Manage senior leaders (Tech Leads, Squad Leads, Managers) and grow a high-performing, engaged organization.


• Set clear ownership boundaries and operating models between Platform and Product Engineering teams.
   

3. Technology & Delivery Accountability

• Ensure Platform services are reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient.


• Oversee cloud and platform capabilities including (but not limited to):




• AWS infrastructure (VPC, EKS, EC2, RDS, ELB, Cognito, etc.)


• Messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka/Confluent, RabbitMQ)


• Datastores and observability (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Elastic)


• API management and edge components (Apigee, DNS, networking)




• Own the golden path to production, including CI/CD, testing strategies, quality gates, and release processes.


• Drive automation-first approaches across the SDLC.
   

4. Cross-Functional & Transversal Responsibilities

• Act as a broker and main actor for cross-product initiatives such as:




• Regulatory and compliance requirements


• Disaster recovery and resilience


• Vendor and third-party platform management


• Certificates and secrets lifecycle




• Partner closely with:




• Architecture on standards and target-state designs


• CyberSecurity and BISO on security controls and policies


• Engineering squads to continuously improve developer experience
   

5. Metrics, Governance & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track meaningful Platform KPIs (e.g. DORA metrics, platform adoption, reliability, lead time).


• Use data to drive prioritization, investment decisions, and continuous improvement.


• Ensure platform changes are transparent, well-communicated, and measurable in terms of developer productivity and system stability.

✅Required Experience & Skills

• Leadership & Experience

10+ years in software engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure roles.

Proven experience leading large, multi-team technical organizations.

Strong background in platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud-native environments.

Experience operating in regulated industries (fintech, banking, payments, or similar) is highly desirable.

• Technical Background

Strong understanding of:

Cloud-native architectures and Kubernetes-based platforms

CI/CD pipelines and SDLC automation

Distributed systems, APIs, and microservices

Security, compliance, and operational resilience

Able to challenge designs, ask the right questions, and earn credibility with senior engineers.

• Product & Mindset

Demonstrated ability to treat internal platforms as products.

Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.

Comfortable balancing short-term delivery with long-term architectural health.

🎯 What we offer

🩺 Medical insurance

🦷 Dental insurance

💪 Wellhub

🚑 Life insurance

💉 Annual healthcare

🚌 Transportation allowance

🍕 Meal voucher/food voucher

💰 Annual bonus

📚 Access to self-development programmes

🏢 Hybrid Collaborative environment: Successful candidate must be prepared to work 60% on site

📬 Next step

Apply and if you know someone who might be looking for this opportunity, share it.