Senior Principal AI Platform & DX Lead

IFS; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking a Senior Principal Platform Lead to own the internal developer platform, set strategy, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You will combine architectural thinking with hands-on delivery, building a production-grade platform that developers actually want to use.

This is a leadership-by-influence role in a large, distributed engineeing organisation. You will define standards, implement golden paths, and mentor senior platform engineers while collaborating with

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering with senior/lead experience.
• Owned IDP or developer portal end-to-end and driven adoption in enterprise scale.
• Shipped production-grade developer platforms; strong DX and customer-like mindset.
• Deep hands-on infrastructure skills: Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, secrets management, observability.
• Willing to mentor engineers and influence platform strategy at architectural level.

Responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution for the internal developer platform.
• Define golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standards at scale.
• Drive adoption metrics: onboarding time, self-service usage, and platform NPS.
• Collaborate with NGA product teams and IFS R&D to prioritize fixes and improvements.
• Mentor Principal and Senior platform engineers and elevate DX across teams.
• Represent platform strategy in technical leadership forums and build trust in the organisation.

Skills

8+ years platform engineering

hands-on infrastructure depth

DX / developer experience

strong communication with engineering

Go backend, React/Next.js

Kafka/RedPanda

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Tools

Backstage

Port

Cortex

Terraform

Crossplane

CI/CD pipelines

observability

Job description

IFS is seeking a Senior Principal Platform Lead to own the internal developer platform, set strategy, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You will combine architectural thinking with hands-on delivery, building a production-grade platform that developers actually want to use.

This is a leadership-by-influence role in a large, distributed engineeing organisation. You will define standards, implement golden paths, and mentor senior platform engineers while collaborating with