Head of Engineering

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MetLife in Asia has adopted a nimble approach to each market across the region and has successfully established a diversified geographical footprint in Asia that spans across nine markets Australia, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Korea, India, Malaysia, Nepal and Vietnam.

Position: Head of Engineering

Job Location: Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia

Role Value Proposition:

The Head of Engineering is a senior technology leadership role accountable for the strategy, modernization, reliability, and end‑to‑end lifecycle management of core application and integration platforms. These platforms serve as the foundational technology backbone for the business and enable mission‑critical operations, customer servicing, and business growth.

In this role you will act as the primary platform leader, working with business leaders, product owners, enterprise architecture, security, and global teams to drive delivery excellence, enhance system availability, and modernize the platform ecosystem in alignment with MetLife's global strategy.

The successful candidate would be one that ensures the availability of platforms to support business operations, ensuring that all platforms are up to date with a roadmap to modernization to ensure minimal disruption to services rendered by the platform team, and successfully implements new technologies such AI into the platform team's workstream and leveraging AI to take the team and platforms to the next level. This role balances long‑term platform strategy and modernization with day‑to‑day operational accountability for mission‑critical platforms.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and own the long‑term platform strategy, including roadmap planning, architecture evolution, modernization initiatives, and technology refresh cycles. Platforms in scope include, but are not limited to, enterprise service bus, workflow platforms, common frameworks, and sales and servicing platforms.
• Ensure platform operations comply with Financial Services Agency (FSA) regulations, internal risk frameworks, and data governance requirements.
• Establish and monitor reliability targets (SLOs and SLIs) and drive continuous improvement in MTTR, service health, and operational resilience.
• Lead, coach, develop, and empower team members to achieve business objectives and deliver high‑quality platform initiatives, including system upgrades, capability enhancements, increased availability, and the adoption of AIOps capabilities.
• Drive reliability engineering practices such as scalability, self‑healing, and availability patterns, with the objective of continuously improving system availability and technology currency.
• Own the platform budget, ensuring optimal investment utilization and cost efficiency. Manage vendor partnerships, SLAs, and strategic suppliers to maximize value delivery.

Candidate Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent.

Technical Competencies:

• Deep expertise in Java, SQL/NoSQL technologies and modern front-end frameworks with a proven track record of designing, building, and operating enterprise‑grade, large‑scale, and highly scalable applications across both on‑premises and cloud‑native environments.
• Leveraged and championed the use of AI, machine learning and AI-assisted engineering tools (GitHub Copilot, coding agents) to improve platform reliability, observability, developer productivity and software quality.
• Hands‑on exposure to cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containerization, orchestration, and cloud‑native services.
• Strong hands‑on experience with enterprise integration and middleware technologies, including Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platforms and Oracle API Gateway, supporting high‑volume, mission‑critical workloads.
• Experience leading cloud migration and platform modernization initiatives, including re‑platforming, refactoring, and technology currency uplift for legacy systems.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and AIOps capabilities to improve platform reliability and operational efficiency.

Essential Business Experience:

• Demonstrated ability to balance technical and operational excellence with people leadership, delivery accountability, and innovation.
• Strong experience partnering with product and business stakeholders to align platform capabilities with customer and business outcomes.
• Growth mindset, with a focus on learning, adaptability, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing.

Leadership Competencies:

• Sets High Standards – Drives a culture of production ownership, resilience, and operational excellence across mission‑critical platforms
• Thinks Strategically – Sets direction aligned with company strategy, applying a global perspective to meet local and enterprise needs.
• Motivates and Empowers – Gains commitment through clear communication of vision and empowers teams to deliver results and grow professionally.
• Creates Partnerships – Builds trusted relationships across Japan platform teams, IT business units, and business stakeholders.
• Grows Talent – Proactively develops diverse talent, fosters engagement, and drives high performance across teams.