Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

IFS; Madrid; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is building the next generation of AI-native enterprise software. This Senior Principal Platform Lead role focuses on owning the Internal Developer Platform, setting strategy, and delivering golden paths.

It is hands-on, not management, and requires writing production-grade code and leading by example across a large, distributed engineering organisation. You will collaborate with NGA product teams and R&D, shape platform standards, and drive adoption with measurable metrics.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering.
• Ownership of an IDP/Developer Portal end-to-end.
• Production experience with Kubernetes at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on architectural thinking and delivery.

Responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution.
• Define platform standards to make the right way the easy way.
• Drive measurable adoption: self-service, time-to-first-deployment, platform metrics.
• Collaborate with NGA product teams and R&D to understand and fix pain points.
• Mentor and guide engineers across a distributed organisation.

Skills

Platform engineering

Senior IC / technical lead

Kubernetes in production

Terraform / Crossplane

Backstage / IDP tooling

Tools

Backstage

Port

Cortex

Terraform

Crossplane

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

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. You will be owning the vision and executing it.

So please note that before you apply, you should be a hands-on Senior Principal Platform Engineer who builds through code and automates by default. Last week you would have been writing a lot of code!

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, and running pipelines and infrastructure for other teams is not the same as giving them something they can serve themselves with. We want to understand what you personally built that other engineers use without coming to you.

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.

You should also have run Kubernetes in production — deployed to it, operated it, and been there when it broke. 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.

If you have built an Internal Developer Platform before, we particularly want to talk to you — you will go straight to the top of the queue.

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.

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. We deliver award-winning enterprise software solutions through the use of embedded digital innovation and a single cloud-based platform to help businesses be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™.

At IFS, we're flexible, we're innovative, and we're focused not only on how we can engage with our customers, but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society's greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and accept that there are so many different perspectives in this world. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We're looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs.

Job Description

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

Qualifications

• 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

Additional Information

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.