Senior Principal Internal Developer Platform Lead

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

Job summary

IFS seeks a Senior Principal Platform Lead to own and shape our Internal Developer Platform. This hands-on IC role drives the strategy, builds the platform, and delivers self-service templates and golden paths for enterprise teams.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders, ensuring the platform enables developers to self-serve with reliable, well-documented tooling across NGA and IFS products.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infra, or developer-tooling engineering.
• Owned an IDP or developer portal end-to-end (Backstage, Port, Cortex, or equivalent).
• Shipped platform tooling at enterprise scale and driven adoption.
• Deep infra depth: Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, secrets management, observability.
• Able to articulate platform value to product leaders and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution (service catalog, self-service scaffolding, golden paths, CI/CD integration).
• Own NXG/Nexus platform developer experience from service creation to production observability.
• Collaborate across Kairos, Nexus, Auth, Base Tech, and product teams for cohesive DX.
• Define platform standards to make the right way the easy way.
• Drive adoption metrics: onboarding time, self-service completion, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment, DORA metrics.
• Integrate authentication/authorization into the IDP self-service model.

Skills

Platform engineering

Kubernetes

Go

React

CI/CD

Terraform

GitOps

PostgreSQL

Observability

Developer portals

Tools

Backstage

Port

Cortex

Terraform

Crossplane

Job description

IFS seeks a Senior Principal Platform Lead to own and shape our Internal Developer Platform. This hands-on IC role drives the strategy, builds the platform, and delivers self-service templates and golden paths for enterprise teams.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders, ensuring the platform enables developers to self-serve with reliable, well-documented tooling across NGA and IFS products.