Senior Principal Platform DX Lead

IFS; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is hiring a Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, to own the Internal Developer Platform and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You combine architectural thinking with hands‑on delivery, and you lead without formal authority in a large, distributed engineering organisation.

You have 8+ years in platform or developer‑tooling, with production Kubernetes, Go, and CI/CD depth. Expect a hybrid role with global collaboration and impactful, enterprise‑scale DX initiatives.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer‑tooling engineering.
• Hands‑on contributor who builds through code and automates by default.
• Experience running Kubernetes in production is essential.
• Ability to communicate platform strategy to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

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 to production observability.
• Collaborate with multiple product teams to deliver cohesive, integrated developer experiences.
• Define platform standards and drive measurable adoption and platform trust at scale.
• Mentor and guide senior platform engineers, raising the bar on DX.

Skills

Platform engineering

Developer tooling

Code in production

Technical leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

GitOps

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Crossplane

Observability

AKS

Go

React/Next.js

PostgreSQL

Kafka/RedPanda

Job description

IFS is hiring a Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, to own the Internal Developer Platform and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. You combine architectural thinking with hands‑on delivery, and you lead without formal authority in a large, distributed engineering organisation.

You have 8+ years in platform or developer‑tooling, with production Kubernetes, Go, and CI/CD depth. Expect a hybrid role with global collaboration and impactful, enterprise‑scale DX initiatives.