Platform Lead

IFS; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking a Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, to close the gap between idea and production by owning the Internal Developer Platform and improving developer experience across NGA and IFS product teams. This role blends architectural thinking with hands-on delivery, guiding engineers without direct authority in a large distributed organisation.

You will define the IDP strategy, drive adoption, and collaborate across multiple tech domains to deliver cohesive experiences, with a

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering.
• Experience owning an IDP or developer portal end-to-end.
• Shipped developer platforms into production at enterprise scale and drove adoption.
• Hands-on depth in Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability.

Responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution across platforms and service catalogues.
• Define platform standards to make the right choice easy and obviously better.
• Drive measurable adoption metrics such as onboarding time, self-service completion, and platform NPS.
• Integrate authentication and authorization services into the IDP self-service model.
• Work with NGA product teams and IFS R&D to identify pain points and prioritise fixes.
• Mentor and guide senior platform engineers to raise DX standards.

Skills

Platform engineering

Technical leadership

Developer portals

Metrics-driven decisions

Tools

Kubernetes

GitOps

Terraform

Crossplane

CI/CD pipelines

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 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer‑tooling engineering, At least 3 years in senior/staff IC or technical lead role, Experience owning an IDP or developer portal end‑to‑end (e.g., Backstage, Port, Cortex), Experience bringing developer platforms into production at enterprise scale, Hands‑on depth in Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability, Experience shipping golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale, Ability to use data (surveys, metrics) for prioritisation, Proficiency in Go (backend), React / Next.js (frontend), Kafka / RedPanda, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes (AKS), Ability to communicate clearly with engineering leaders and product directors, Experience working in a large, distributed engineering organisation