Senior AI Platform Engineer — Production IDP Expert

IFS; Staines-upon-Thames; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to lead the implementation and ongoing support of the IFS Internal Developer Platform. You will enable product teams to self-serve infrastructure, services, and deployment pipelines on Kairos and Nexus, building robust, production-grade IDP capabilities.

This deeply technical, delivery-focused role requires hands-on engineering across NGA stack, cloud-native infrastructure, and strong platform thinking to drive reliability and performance improvements

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building or operating IDPs in production environments.
• Practical experience with IDP tooling: Backstage, Port, Cortex, or comparable platforms.
• Experience implementing service catalogues, scaffolders, golden paths, and self-service infrastructure workflows.
• Familiarity with integrating IDPs into CI/CD pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Implement, configure, and maintain the IFS Internal Developer Platform end-to-end
• Build self-service workflows, service catalogue entries, scaffolders, and golden path templates
• Integrate IDP tooling with Kairos (application framework) and Nexus (infrastructure and deployment)
• Build and maintain CI/CD integration patterns for product team consumption
• Create and maintain developer-facing documentation, guides, and enablement materials
• Provide platform support and technical enablement to product development teams
• Contribute to platform standards, architectural decisions, and the IDP roadmap
• Identify and resolve platform reliability and performance issues
• Collaborate closely with the Platform Lead and adjacent platform teams (Base Tech, Auth, Nexus)

Skills

IDP in production

IDP tooling (Backstage/Port/Cortex)

Service catalogues / scaffolders /黄金路径

CI/CD integration

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

DevOps toolchains

Event-driven architecture

Kubernetes / cloud-native

Go

React/Next.js

Kafka / RedPanda

PostgreSQL

Tools

Backstage

Port

Cortex

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

IFS is hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to lead the implementation and ongoing support of the IFS Internal Developer Platform. You will enable product teams to self-serve infrastructure, services, and deployment pipelines on Kairos and Nexus, building robust, production-grade IDP capabilities.

This deeply technical, delivery-focused role requires hands-on engineering across NGA stack, cloud-native infrastructure, and strong platform thinking to drive reliability and performance improvements