Head of Department - Data Platforms (all humans)

Make a difference in the financial life of millions of people: At Erste Digital you are co-creating the digital future, in which better financial health is possible. #believeinyourself We are part of Erste Group – the largest banking group in Central and Eastern Europe with more than 2,500 branches and over 45,000 employees. Our more than 2,000 IT experts and enthusiasts are the bank's Digital Muscle. Job Description: Tribe SRE is looking for a Head of Department to lead the Data Platforms department, with a strong focus on Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE). As an enabling organization, Tribe SRE supports business tribes as internal clients by delivering reliable, secure, scalable, and efficient platform services across on-premises and AWS environments. In this role, you will be responsible for the strategy, delivery, and continuous improvement of data platform services while strengthening collaboration across teams and departments, reducing silos, and building a more resilient and shared engineering capability. The department’s scope includes Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Exadata, MongoDB, and Hadoop during its transition and sustainment phase. Your mission is to increase platform reliability, expand self-service capabilities, reduce operational effort through automation, and enable business tribes to move faster through robust platform foundations. Team Scope: You will lead a department of 32 engineers, consisting of both internal colleagues and external partners. The department is organized into three teams across Vienna, Bratislava, and Košice. In this role, you will provide clear direction, strengthen collaboration across locations, develop leadership and engineering capabilities, and ensure that internal and external team members work together effectively toward shared platform goals. What to do: Lead the Data Platforms department with end-to-end ownership of strategy, delivery, service quality, operational excellence, and continuous improvement across database platform services. Represent Data Platforms within the broader SRE organization and build strong partnerships with business tribes as internal clients. Translate business needs into reliable, scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform services. Drive Database Reliability Engineering practices to improve reliability, resilience, security, performance, and operational maturity. Own and evolve the data platform landscape across on-premises and AWS environments, including Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Exadata, MongoDB, and Hadoop. Lead the strategic evolution toward PostgreSQL as the target relational database platform while ensuring the stability and support of existing Oracle-based services. Increase automation, reduce operational toil, and expand self-service capabilities by leveraging modern engineering practices and platform thinking. Establish and strengthen Application DBA capabilities within Erste Digital by building knowledge, standards, and expertise where this capability is currently limited. Lead, develop, and grow a distributed department of internal and external engineers across Vienna, Bratislava, and Košice, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous learning, and engineering excellence. Align with senior stakeholders and business tribes on priorities, roadmaps, adoption plans, and measurable service outcomes.