Senior Principal Platform Lead || Internal Developer Platform

If you have built an Internal Developer Platform before, we want to talk to you — you will go straight to the top of the queue. If you have run a developer portal such as Backstage, Port, Cortex or Choreo, say so and tell us what was in the catalogue.

This is one of the most senior individual contributor roles in platform engineering at IFS. You will set the direction for our Internal Developer Platform and then build it — owning the vision and executing it.

Please note that before you apply, you should be a hands-on Senior Principal Platform Engineer who builds through code and automates by default. This is a greenfield build: no Internal Developer Platform, no tooling chosen, no templates written, and no roadmap waiting for you. This is an individual contributor role, not a management one — you will not have a team to delegate to.

This is not an infrastructure or reliability role. If your experience is CI/CD pipeline ownership, release engineering, cloud administration, or monitoring and incident response, that is valuable work but it is not what this role needs, and we will not be progressing applications on that basis.

The difference is what your developers get from you. What you build here is the thing they use directly — the portal they go to, the service catalogue, the templates that scaffold a new service, the golden paths, the documentation. Running pipelines and infrastructure for other teams is not the same as giving them something they can serve themselves with.

You should also have run Kubernetes in production — deployed to it, operated it, and been there when it broke. AI should have changed how you work, specifically. We will ask which tools, what for, and what they are bad at. Vocabulary without examples does not get past the first screen.

You will also be making the case for this platform to product managers and engineering leaders, not just engineers, and you will need to do it in plain language. If you cannot explain what you have built to someone non-technical, this is not the role for you.

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.