Senior Platform Engineer - Internal Developer Platform

About the role

Frontiers, an open-access research publisher, is transforming its engineering platform into an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) built on modern principles and AI-augmented workflows, with the goal of becoming an Agentic Development Platform. It is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to build and run the IDP and the AI-First Delivery capabilities on top of it, treating the platform as a product and owning a capability area end to end. The role works closely with the Platform Product Manager and the Senior Cloud Architect.

Key responsibilities

• Build and operate the IDP: golden paths, self-service templates, the Backstage developer portal and IDP catalog, and guardrails that keep teams compliant by default.
• Own CI/CD and GitOps: GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Actions, migrate away from Azure DevOps, and implement GitOps with ArgoCD for AKS.
• Provision cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform and Helm (AKS, networking, databases, APIM, Key Vault, Entra ID), managing reliability and cost.
• Improve observability and reliability: instrument systems with NewRelic and Grafana, define SLOs and reduce operational toil.
• Advance AI-First Delivery and the ADP: build agent-ready context (MCP, the Technology Framework), path definitions and agent governance.
• Own a capability area end to end, set reference patterns and ADRs, and raise the bar through code review, mentoring and pairing.
• Design for adoption: write working documentation, gather feedback from teams, and partner with the Platform Product Manager on priorities.

Required profile

• A full-stack software engineering background: you have built and shipped production software yourself (C#/.NET, Node.js, Python, Go or similar).
• Senior-level experience, typically 5+ years building and operating cloud platforms, owning a capability area and mentoring others.
• Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes (AKS), including networking, storage and managed databases.
• Experience with Terraform, Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD or similar); experience migrating from other CI systems is a plus.
• Metrics, logs and traces, SLOs, error budgets, and security/compliance as code.
• Already uses AI coding assistants such as Cursor and wants to build golden paths and agent workflows.
• Professional-level English (spoken and written).

Required skills

• Core stack: Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), Docker, C#/.NET and Node.js.
• IaC and GitOps: Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD.
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (ideal), Azure DevOps.
• Observability: NewRelic, Grafana.
• Nice to have: Azure APIM, Apollo Federation/GraphOS, Backstage, MCP, GitHub Spec-Kit, InnerSource, Team Topologies, DORA, n8n and FinOps.

What we offer

• Extra wellbeing days on top of annual leave.
• Up to 3 paid volunteering days per year.
• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme.
• Learning and development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub.