Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems in London

At IFS, we're building the next generation of AI-native enterprise software, transforming how some of the world's largest organisations manage assets, operations and critical services. This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern AI engineering, building intelligent products that combine Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI and cloud-native technologies to solve complex, real-world business challenges at enterprise scale.

We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building production AI systems and excited by the opportunity to shape the future of enterprise software. Please note that this role requires demonstrable, hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications. Candidates whose AI experience is limited to using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot to assist software development, without demonstrable experience building AI-powered products or systems, will not meet the requirements for this role.

We have a platform that can do more than our developers are getting out of it. The gap isn’t capability, it’s the experience. Too much tribal knowledge, too many tickets to get things done, too much cognitive load between “I want to build something” and “it’s running in production.”

As Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, you close that gap. You will set the strategy, own the Internal Developer Platform, define golden paths, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams, serving as the voice of the developer inside the platform organisation. You combine architectural thinking with hands-on delivery, and you understand that the best developer platforms are the ones developers actually want to use. This is not a management role, but you will lead without authority across a large, distributed engineering organisation.

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution at IFS, service catalogue, self-service scaffolding, golden paths, CI/CD integration, and developer portals.
• Own the developer experience vision for the Nexus platform, from service creation through to production observability.
• Work across Kairos, Nexus, Auth, Base Tech, and product teams to deliver cohesive, integrated developer experiences.
• Define platform standards that make the right way the easy way, not mandated, just obviously better.
• Drive measurable adoption: onboarding time, self-service completion rates, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment, DORA metrics.
• Integrate authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model.
• Work directly with NGA product teams and IFS R&D domain teams to understand where they’re struggling and prioritise what to fix.
• Partner with IAM, infrastructure, and SRE teams to ensure the developer-facing surface of the platform is coherent, reliable, and secure.
• Establish feedback loops, developer surveys, usage analytics, office hours, and act on them relentlessly.
• Influence platform strategy at the architectural level and represent the developer platform in technical leadership forums.
• Mentor and technically guide Principal and Senior platform engineers, raising the bar on what “good DX” looks like at IFS.

You have 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role. This is a platform engineering role: deep infrastructure and operational experience is essential, not a nice-to-have.

You’ve owned an IDP or developer portal end-to-end (Backstage, Port, Cortex, or equivalent), including the grind of keeping it adopted and maintained. You’ve brought developer platforms into production at enterprise scale, and you know why adoption fails even when the technology is right.

You have genuine hands-on infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability, you can go deep, not just direct. You’ve shipped golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale.

You think about your internal developers as customers, not consumers, you’ve run surveys, tracked metrics, and made hard prioritisation calls based on that data. You know when the bottleneck is a process, not a pipeline.

You’re comfortable in the NGA stack or can get there fast: Go (backend), React / Next.js (frontend), Kafka / RedPanda (event-driven), PostgreSQL, running on Kubernetes (AKS).

You communicate clearly with engineering leaders and product directors, this role shapes platform strategy, not just implements it. You’ve worked in a large, distributed engineering organisation and understand how to build platform trust.

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.