Platform Engineering Manager (W/M) at Lesaffre · Marcq-en-…

Company Description

As a global key player in yeasts and fermentation, Lesaffre designs, manufactures and markets innovative solutions for Baking, Food taste & pleasure, Health care and Biotechnology.

Family group born in northern France in 1853, now a multi-national and a multicultural company, Lesaffre is committed to working with confidence to better nourish and protect the planet.

In close collaboration with its clients and partners, Lesaffre employs 11 700 people in more than 50 countries.

Lesaffre achieves a turnover of 3,2 billion euros.

Job Description

At Lesaffre, Digital, Data & Tech is a fundamental transformative force for Lesaffre growth. It is a lever to increase customer centricity and user experience, achieve operational excellence, supercharge R&D, and empower our teams across the entire company.

At the heart of this digital transformation is our delivery department, where we turn innovative ideas into impactful solutions. Central to that effort is our Platform Team. We are the architects and engineers building the robust, scalable, and secure foundation that empowers every other team in the department to build, deploy, and innovate at speed.

We deliver highly flexible, secure, and performant services. We're not just about managing infrastructure; we're about creating a seamless, self-service experience for our internal customers, ensuring they have everything they need to leverage cloud-native services and harness the full potential of their data.

As a member of this team, you'll be directly contributing to the efficiency, innovation, and success of every initiative within our delivery department. Your work will directly enable our organization to be data-driven and cloud-powered, fostering a culture of rapid experimentation and deployment.

In this context, Lesaffre is recruiting a Platform Engineering Manager

As the Platform Engineering Manager, you wear two critical hats: you are the Engineering Leader managing a hybrid team of deep technical experts, and you act as the Product Owner of our Self Services Platform.

You will be the voice of our internal customers, our software engineering, data science, SAP, and analytics squads. You will be responsible for leading the team to define, build, and champion the platform's features. Your goal is to ensure we build an intuitive, self-service platform that directly addresses developer pain points and accelerates their workflows across AWS, Azure, Snowflake, and the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). You play a crucial role in shaping the developer experience (DX) and transitioning our infrastructure into a scalable product.

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & People Management

• Lead the Experts: Manage, mentor, and grow a diverse team of internal engineers and external partners, specifically including the SAP Solution Architect, SAP Cloud Ops Engineer, and Cloud/DevOps/Data Engineers.
• Capacity & Delivery: Oversee the agile delivery of the platform roadmap. Manage resource allocation, ensuring the team balances daily operational support with long-term platform engineering and automation.
• Culture Builder: Foster a culture of software craftsmanship, continuous learning, and "automation-first" thinking within the Platform team.

Vision & Strategy

• Tactic Alignment: As the Platform Lead, collaborate with the Lead Cloud & Solution Architect and Head of Engineering to define and communicate the product vision and strategy for the Cloud, Data, and SAP platforms.
• Business Value: Align platform priorities with broader business objectives and the specific needs of the consuming feature teams (Product Squads).

Customer & Stakeholder Management

• User Advocacy: Conduct deep-dive interviews, workshops, and surveys with internal users to understand their pain points and desired functionalities related to AWS/Azure services, Snowflake, and SAP integration.
• The Bridge: Act as the primary liaison between consuming feature squads and your platform engineering team. Manage stakeholder expectations and communicate roadmaps, releases, and service changes effectively.

Product Ownership & Backlog Management

• Translating Needs: Translate user needs into clear, actionable user stories, epics, and acceptance criteria for platform services (e.g., self-service AWS/Azure account provisioning, standardized Snowflake data pipelines, SAP BTP integration wrappers).
• Prioritization: Own and prioritize the platform backlog, ensuring alignment with strategic goals while carefully balancing technical debt reduction with new feature development.
• Agile Execution: Lead and participate actively in agile ceremonies (sprint planning, stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives) for the Platform team.

Developer Experience (DX) & Service Adoption

• Frictionless DX: Champion an exceptional developer experience by identifying friction points and advocating for streamlined workflows, intuitive tooling (e.g., AWS Service Catalog, internal developer portals, custom CLI tools), and comprehensive documentation.
• Service Definition: Ensure clear definion of the scope and capabilities of platform services (e.g., standard cloud landing zones, shared Snowflake data layers, CI/CD templates for hybrid deployments).
• Metrics: Monitor the adoption and usage of platform services, gathering feedback for continuous improvement.

Compliance, FinOps & Executive Reporting

• Performance Measurement (Metrics & KPIs): Define, track, and continuously monitor key platform performance indicators. This includes engineering velocity (e.g., DORA metrics like Deployment Frequency and Lead Time), platform uptime, and internal user adoption rates.
• Executive Reporting: Regularly consolidate and present platform health, roadmap progress, and team performance dashboards to the Head of Engineering & Infrastructure and other senior stakeholders. Translate complex technical achievements into clear business value.
• FinOps & Budget Tracking: Build cost awareness into platform services and track cloud/platform expenditure. Provide monthly FinOps reports highlighting cloud waste reduction, cost-per-squad, and budget forecasting.
• Compliance by Design: Work closely with Cybersecurity and Core Infrastructure to ensure platform services natively meet compliance requirements (GDPR, security policies) and report on the compliance posture of the deployed infrastructure.

Qualifications

Required Skills & Experience:

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in IT, with a proven track record combining Engineering/People Management and Product Ownership for internal platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure/data services.
• Cloud Mastery: Solid understanding of cloud concepts and services, with practical experience or strong theoretical knowledge of AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM) and/or Azure.
• Data Ecosystem: Familiarity with data concepts (warehouses, databases, schemas, roles, basic data loading) and modern data engineering pipelines.
• Agile Leadership: Proven ability to gather, analyze, and prioritize technical requirements from diverse stakeholders using agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban).
• Communication: Excellent presentation and interpersonal skills, with the unique ability to bridge the gap between deep technical teams and non-technical business stakeholders.
• Languages: Fluent in English and French (written and spoken) is mandatory for local collaboration and global documentation.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• SAP Ecosystem: Understanding of modern SAP integration concepts, specifically SAP BTP (Integration Suite, Extension Suite), to effectively manage and guide the SAP experts on your team.
• Experience building or managing Internal Developer Portals (e.g., Backstage) or AWS Service Catalog.
• Deep understanding of FinOps principles and cloud cost optimization.
• Background as a hands-on Software Engineer, Data Engineer, or DevOps/SRE.

Additional Information

What can Lesaffre offer you:

• We are a successful family-owned company with long-standing history where people truly matter.
• We promote a sense of fulfilment with a genuine mission: nourish and protect the planet.
• An opportunity to work in a real international environment.

All our jobs are open to people with disabilities.

At Lesaffre, diversity is a strength that enriches our culture and our teams. We are committed to offering you a work environment where you can thrive, regardless of your background, gender, age or abilities. We encourage all applications, as we believe that diverse perspectives strengthen our ability to innovate and meet the challenges of tomorrow.