Senior Principal Platform Lead - AI & Agentic Systems

About the role

IFS is hiring a Senior Principal Platform Lead for its Internal Developer Platform (IDP) in Madrid, within its AI and agentic systems research and development work. This is a greenfield build: no existing platform, tooling or templates, and it is an individual contributor role, not management. The person must be able to explain the platform in plain language to product managers and engineering leaders.

Key responsibilities

• Own the IDP vision, roadmap and end-to-end execution, including 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
• Work with Kairos, Nexus, Auth, Base Tech and product teams to deliver integrated developer experiences
• Define platform standards and drive adoption, measured by onboarding time, self-service completion, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment and DORA metrics
• Integrate authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model
• Partner with IAM, infrastructure and SRE teams to keep the platform coherent, reliable and secure
• Run feedback loops, surveys and usage analytics, and mentor Principal and Senior platform engineers

Required profile

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure or developer-tooling engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role
• Hands-on infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform / Crossplane, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management and observability
• Experience shipping golden paths, service templates and CI/CD standardisation at scale
• Experience owning an IDP or developer portal end-to-end (Backstage, Port, Cortex or equivalent)
• Comfortable in the NGA stack: Go, React / Next.js, Kafka / RedPanda, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes (AKS)
• Ability to communicate with engineering leaders and product directors

What we offer

• Flexibility and hybrid work opportunities
• A global, diverse environment within a company committed to sustainability