IFS

Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

London, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid · Full-time

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About the role

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EmployerIFS
LocationLondon, England, United Kingdom
Work styleHybrid
Employment typeFull-time
Employer posted2 months ago

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

Show full description

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.

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