Senior Principal Platform Lead, AI & Developer Experience

IFS; England; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

IFS is seeking a Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, to own the Internal Developer Platform, define golden paths, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. The role combines architectural thinking with hands-on delivery and is not a management position, but requires leadership without authority across a large distributed engineering org.

You will own the IDP vision, integrate with CI/CD, service templates, and self-service scaffolding, while collaborating with product teams

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering.
• Own an IDP or developer portal end-to-end (Backstage, Port, Cortex or equivalent).
• Hands-on production Kubernetes, not just CI/CD ownership.
• Able to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution at IFS.
• Define platform standards to make the right way the easy way.
• Drive adoption metrics and feedback loops across teams.
• Mentor Principal and Senior platform engineers and raise the DX bar.

Skills

Platform engineering

Kubernetes

Go

React/Next.js

CI/CD

Terraform

Observability

Developer experience

Tools

Backstage

Port

Cortex

Job description

IFS is seeking a Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, to own the Internal Developer Platform, define golden paths, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams. The role combines architectural thinking with hands-on delivery and is not a management position, but requires leadership without authority across a large distributed engineering org.

You will own the IDP vision, integrate with CI/CD, service templates, and self-service scaffolding, while collaborating with product teams