Associate Senior Product Owner - Platform Engineering

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 130 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges.

For more information, visit www.worldbank.org ITS Vice Presidency Context The Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) enables the World Bank Group to achieve its mission of ending extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet by delivering transformative information and technologies to its staff working in over 150+ locations. For more information on ITS, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9 v=VTFGffa1Y7w Background Context The World Bank Group's Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) vice presidency is at the forefront of the institution's digital transformation. The Platform Engineering team within ITS is responsible for building and operating the internal developer platform (IDP) and the underlying cloud infrastructure that powers the Bank's technology ecosystem. The team is transitioning from a traditional infrastructure operations model toward a product-oriented, developer-first platform engineering discipline — one that enables software delivery teams to move faster, safer, and with greater autonomy through well-defined golden paths and self-service capabilities.

This is a senior technical role at the heart of that transformation. The selected candidate will serve as the technical authority for platform engineering, driving the design, development, and continuous evolution of the IDP, cloud infrastructure-as-code, and AI infrastructure capabilities. While people management responsibilities rest with the team leader, the candidate will be expected to guide and mentor junior staff, assign and track technical work, and set the engineering standards that define how the team operates. Duties Accountabilities The Senior Platform Engineering Specialist will be responsible for the following: Technical Leadership Platform Development • Lead the technical design, development, and operations of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), serving as the primary technical authority and decision-maker for platform architecture. • Own the end-to-end implementation of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices using Terraform, ensuring consistent, auditable, and repeatable infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments. • Define, build, and maintain golden paths — opinionated, pre-approved software delivery workflows and templates — that enable development teams to deliver software securely and efficiently without requiring deep infrastructure expertise. • Architect and operate cloud infrastructure on both AWS and Azure, ensuring platforms are secure, scalable, cost-efficient, and aligned with WBG policies and standards. • Serve as the lead engineer for the Internal Developer Portal (using Port.io), driving adoption, feature development, and integration with the Bank's software delivery ecosystem.

Strategic Direction Platform Evolution • Champion the philosophical and operational shift from traditional infrastructure management to platform engineering, articulating the value of this transformation clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike. • Develop and maintain a platform roadmap in alignment with ITS strategy, anticipating the evolving needs of internal development teams and proactively addressing capability gaps. • Contribute to the Bank's broader DevSecOps culture by embedding security, observability, and developer experience considerations into every layer of the platform. • Partner closely with teams responsible for AI platforms such as Databricks and AWS Bedrock to understand their deployment patterns, requirements, and agreed standards — then translate those into automated, repeatable provisioning pipelines owned and operated by the Platform Engineering team. • Automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of AI infrastructure components in accordance with standards defined by the owning teams, ensuring consistency, auditability, and scalability across environments. • Bring sufficient hands-on familiarity with AI agent development to engage meaningfully with AI platform teams, understand their technical needs, and build the automation and self-service capabilities that support their work. Mentorship Work Coordination • Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level platform engineers, supporting their professional deve