TECH PRODUCT PLATFORM MANAGER

At OakNorth, were on a mission to empower ambitious businesses and the communities they serve. Since 2015, weve lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while driving economic growth in the markets we serve.

OakNorth has over 200 applications in use across the business, AI is changing the tooling landscape rapidly, and we’re building the structure to ensure wemake sensible, well-governed choices about the tools we invest in, without slowing anyone down.

We’re an AI-native bank. Our teams use AI tools as standard, but as AI capabilities multiply, so does the risk of sprawl, duplication, and ungoverned adoption. We need someone to ensure that the platform underneath all of this incoherent, well-managed, and enabling teams to move faster, not creating friction.

Today, tool adoption happens organically: teams procure independently, capabilities overlap, and there’s limited visibility into what exists across the organisation. We’re building a Platform & Tool Enablement function to fix that. Not by adding gates, but by creating the guardrails that help teams move faster and smarter — with AI-native tools at the centre of how we evaluate, adopt, and govern our technology landscape.

As our Tech Product Platform Manager, you’ll sit within the Platform team and down the product strategy for how OakNorth discovers, evaluates, governs, and supports its tools and platforms. You’ll build the triage and assessment framework that sits upstream of formal Change Management Group (CMG)submissions, create the capability map of our technology landscape, and design the simplified submission process that unifies how we handle both new tool procurement and changes to existing tools — all through the lens of an organization where AI is a first-class participant in how work gets done.

The Role

You will:

• Own the product vision and roadmap for the Platform & Tool Enablement function, delivering the triage and assessment framework, capability mapping, and simplified submission process as your first three workstreams
• Build and maintain a comprehensive capability map of OakNorth’s application estate, identifying overlaps, gaps, and consolidation opportunities using a structured rationalization approach (Keep, Invest, Tolerate, Replace, Retire) — with specific attention to where AI-native tool scan replace or augment legacy capabilities
• Design and operate the triage process for tool-related change, acting as the first point of assessment to ensure submissions are complete, correctly categorized, and routed efficiently — making governance faster, not slower
• Create a unified intake process covering new tool procurement, feature enablement within existing tools, and enterprise-wide rollouts — ensuring licensing, security, ownership, and data considerations are handled early
• Define and embed AI-native tool selection criteria across the organisation— prioritizing tools with built-in AI enablement, MCP capabilities, and multi-model interaction support so we can move between models without changing tools as the landscape evolves
• Partner with the IT Operations, Cybersecurity, AI Enablement, Platform and Product Engineering Experience teams to ensure enterprise and platform enablement are aligned. You ensure the broader platform and governance context supports and doesn’t conflict.
• Support the organisation by wrapping enablement around AI tools to ensure secure deployment and prevent sprawl — including governance for AI tools, AI-assisted code contribution controls, context boundary policies, and data residency requirements
• Work closely with the Director of IT and Director of Platform Engineering toform the core of the Enterprise App Enablement Group, providing the product and process perspective alongside lifecycle management andtechnical architecture
• Develop clear, practical governance documentation for both technical andnon-technical stakeholders Define and track metrics that demonstrate enablement value: reduction induplicated tooling, faster time-to-adoption, improved compliance rates, AItool adoption and effectiveness, and reduced overhead for teamsnavigating procurement
• Prove value through a pilot with one business unit or area before scalingenablement frameworks organisation-wide
  
  
  

• 5-7 years in experience in technology product management, enterprisearchitecture or technology operations — ideally in an environment where you’ve had to bring structure to a fragmented technology estate while AIways actively reshaping it
• Think in systems, not features — you can see how 200+ applications interconnect, where capabilities overlap, and where AI-native alternatives could consolidate or transform existing workflows
• Have a genuine interest in AI-native tools and how they’re changing the way organisations work — you’re excited about MCP, multi-model interaction, agentic workflows, and the rapid evolution of AI capabilities, and you can translate that excitement into practical governance and selection frameworks, as well as new capabilities the bank can leverage
• Are skilled at building frameworks that enable rather than constrain — you instinctively design for guardrails over gates, and you understand that the goal is oversight, not control
• Treat internal platforms and processes as products with real users — you obsess over adoption, run feedback loops, and measure success by whether teams are better supported, not by the volume of process documentation produced
• Can work across organisational boundaries with ease, building trust with Product and Engineering, IT, Procurement, Cybersecurity and business teams without direct authority over any of them and can communicate complex governance and process concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Are comfortable operating in ambiguity and building from scratch — this isa function being stood up, not maintained
• Measure your success in terms of business impact, not process eleganceor technical complexity for its own sake
  
  
  

• Experience in financial services or a regulated environment where toolgovernance carries compliance implications
• Familiarity with application portfolio management approaches, includingcapability mapping and rationalisation frameworks
• Exposure to AI governance frameworks relevant to regulated industries(e.g. FINOS AI Governance Framework, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001)
• Experience with demand intake and onboarding governance — definingreadiness criteria, submission workflows, and onboarding pathways fornew tools
• Familiarity with tools like Notion, Jira or similar application management anddocumentation platforms
  
  
  

• Microsoft 365 (including Entra ID / Azure AD), Azure, and a broadlandscape of SaaS applications across the organisation
• AI coding and productivity tools including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, andCursor — governed through platform engineering standards and AI-assisted code contribution controls
• MCP-enabled tooling and multi-model AI architectures as these becomecentral to how teams interact with AI across the business
• Notion as the primary documentation, knowledge management, and internalenablement platform
• Software Asset Management and application governance tooling (e.g. Zluri) Technical