Senior Principal Platform Lead — AI-Powered Dev Experience

IFS; Paris; Hybrid; EUR 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking an extremely senior hands‑on Platform Lead to own the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and drive its adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You will define golden paths, service templates, and a self‑service model, combining architectural thinking with practical delivery at scale.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders to articulate value to non‑technical stakeholders, shaping the platform strategy while remaining deeply technically hands‑on with Kubernetes,

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer‑tooling engineering.
• 3+ years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role.
• Owned an IDP or developer portal end‑to‑end (Backstage, Port, Cortex, or equivalent).
• Hands‑on infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, GitOps, IaC (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability.
• Shipped golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale.
• Able to communicate platform strategy to engineering leaders and product directors.
• Experience bringing developer platforms into production at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Mentor and technically guide Principal/Senior platform engineers, raising the bar on DX.

Skills

Platform engineering

Senior IC / Technical lead

Kubernetes

Go

React / Next.js

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Developer portals

Tools

Kubernetes

GitOps

Terraform

Crossplane

CI/CD tooling

Secrets management

PostgreSQL

AKS

Job description

IFS is seeking an extremely senior hands‑on Platform Lead to own the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and drive its adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You will define golden paths, service templates, and a self‑service model, combining architectural thinking with practical delivery at scale.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders to articulate value to non‑technical stakeholders, shaping the platform strategy while remaining deeply technically hands‑on with Kubernetes,