Talent.com
IFS
Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic SystemsIFS • London, England, United Kingdom
Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

IFS • London, England, United Kingdom
12 days ago
Job type
  • Full-time
Job description
Job Description

We have a platform that can do more than our developers are getting out of it. The gap isn’t capability, it’s the experience. Too much tribal knowledge, too many tickets to get things done, too much cognitive load between “I want to build something” and “it’s running in production.”

As Senior Principal Platform Lead, Platform DX, you close that gap. You will set the strategy, own the Internal Developer Platform, define golden paths, and drive adoption across NGA and IFS product teams, serving as the voice of the developer inside the platform organisation. You combine architectural thinking with hands-on delivery, and you understand that the best developer platforms are the ones developers actually want to use. This is not a management role, but you will lead without authority across a large, distributed engineering organisation.

  • 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 through to production observability
  • Work across Kairos, Nexus, Auth, Base Tech, and product teams to deliver cohesive, integrated developer experiences
  • Define platform standards that make the right way the easy way, not mandated, just obviously better
  • Drive measurable adoption: onboarding time, self-service completion rates, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment, DORA metrics
  • Integrate authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model
  • Work directly with NGA product teams and IFS R&D domain teams to understand where they’re struggling and prioritise what to fix
  • Partner with IAM, infrastructure, and SRE teams to ensure the developer-facing surface of the platform is coherent, reliable, and secure
  • Establish feedback loops, developer surveys, usage analytics, office hours, and act on them relentlessly
  • Influence platform strategy at the architectural level and represent the developer platform in technical leadership forums
  • Mentor and technically guide Principal and Senior platform engineers, raising the bar on what “good DX” looks like at IFS

Qualifications

  • You have 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role. This is a platform engineering role: deep infrastructure and operational experience is essential, not a nice-to-have.
  • You’ve owned an IDP or developer portal end-to-end (Backstage, Port, Cortex, or equivalent), including the grind of keeping it adopted and maintained
  • You’ve brought developer platforms into production at enterprise scale, and you know why adoption fails even when the technology is right
  • You have genuine hands-on infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability, you can go deep, not just direct
  • You’ve shipped golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale
  • You think about your internal developers as customers, not consumers, you’ve run surveys, tracked metrics, and made hard prioritisation calls based on that data
  • You know when the bottleneck is a process, not a pipeline
  • You’re comfortable in the NGA stack or can get there fast: Go (backend), React / Next.js (frontend), Kafka / RedPanda (event-driven), PostgreSQL, running on Kubernetes (AKS)
  • You communicate clearly with engineering leaders and product directors, this role shapes platform strategy, not just implements it
  • You’ve worked in a large, distributed engineering organisation and understand how to build platform trust


Additional Information

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.

Create a job alert for this search

Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems • London, England, United Kingdom

Similar jobs

Principal, Lead Engineer AI

European Bank for Reconstruction and DevelopmentGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

The Principal, AI/ML Engineer leads the design, delivery and continuous improvement of AI and ML solutions within their area of responsibility, aligning engineering activities to the Bank’s broader... Show more

 • Promoted

Director of Agentic AI Platform Engineering

Citigroup Inc.Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

London seeks a Director of Agentic Platform Engineering to own the technical vision, architecture, and execution of a greenfield platform.You will lead a world-class team, write code, and shape a p... Show more

 • Promoted

Enterprise AI Platform Architect & LLM Strategy Lead

AccentureGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

Accenture in the United Kingdom is seeking an AI Large Language Model (LLM) Technology Lead/Principal Architect to own end-to-end AI platform architecture across enterprise-scale programs.You will ... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal AI Platform Product Lead

Flatiron HealthGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

Flatiron Health, a healthtech company, is seeking a Principal Product Manager for the Agentic AI Platform to advance cancer care by building scalable AI infrastructure.You will own the end-to-end l... Show more

 • Promoted

Lead AI Architect & Principal Software Engineer

RELXGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

RELX is hiring a Principal Software Engineer / Principal AI Engineer in the UK.You will be the technical lead for embedded Innovation Squads, shaping AI architecture, orchestration, and scalable pa... Show more

 • Promoted

Senior AI Platform Architect & Tech Lead

UBDS GroupGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

Principal AI Platform Engineer.UBDS Group delivers modern cloud, data and AI solutions across public and private sector organisations.We design and build scalable, secure and production‑ready platf... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal AI Engineer

Harrington StarrGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

Founding AI Engineer — Build an AI Capability From the Ground Up.A leading global investment business is looking to make its first dedicated AI Engineering hire — a rare opportunity to build and sh... Show more

 • Promoted

Senior Enterprise AI Platform Architect

ByteDanceGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

ByteDance in the Greater London area is seeking an experienced AI platform architect to define the enterprise AI agent platform, governance, and reliability strategy.You will partner with product, ... Show more

 • Promoted

Head of Engineering: Platform & AI-First Leadership

TradinghubGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

TradingHub in London is seeking a Head of Engineering to lead the Engineering Core department, overseeing Infrastructure, Calculation and Web teams powering its cloud-enabled trade surveillance pla... Show more

 • Promoted

Senior AI Platform Engineer & Technical Leader

United Talent AgencyGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

United Talent Agency is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead the development of intelligent software systems.You will design and deploy AI-driven solutions while mentoring engineers and contribu... Show more

 • Promoted

Head of Platform Applications & AI Operations

Tony Blair Institute for Global ChangeGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is seeking a Director of Applications to lead the availability, configuration and evolution of core platforms (Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft 365 / Azure)... Show more

 • Promoted

Cloud Platform Engineering Lead - Build Scalable AI Systems

MistralGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

Mistral, a leader in full-stack AI solutions, is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for the Cloud Platform team in the United Kingdom.You will bridge engineering execution with leadership, guiding a ... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal AI Platform Engineer

Vodafone Group PlcCity of Westminster, England, GB
Full-time

Who we areVOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) is a strategic arm of Vodafone Group Plc, creating value for customers by delivering intelligent solutions through Talent, Technology & Transformatio... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal Enterprise AI Architect — Scale AI Platform (Hybrid, London)

Orbis GroupGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

Orbis Group in London is seeking a Principal Enterprise AI Architect to lead the enterprise AI architecture, governance and platform strategy.This senior IC role reports directly to the Group Head ... Show more

 • Promoted

Platform Engineering Director: Scale, AI & DevOps Strategy

Oliver BernardGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

Oliver Bernard, a Tech for Good company in London, seeks a Platform Director to drive strategy across Platform Engineering, DevOps and SRE.You will shape AI uptake and transformation while mentorin... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal AI Architect

UBDS DigitalGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

At UBDS, we're helping some of the UK's largest public and private sector organisations transform how they adopt and scale Artificial Intelligence.At UBDS, we're helping some of the UK's largest pu... Show more

 • Promoted

Senior AI Platform Architect - Infra, MLOps & Governance

RadNet, Inc.Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

World Wide Technology is seeking an Enterprise Architect for AI who will own end-to-end delivery of AI/ML engagements, from silicon and data center design to software and MLOps governance.This hand... Show more

 • Promoted

Head of AI platform (London, Geneva or Zurich)

Union Bancaire PrivéeGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time +1

Head of AI platform (London, Geneva or Zurich).London, United Kingdom (On-site).Job Category WEALTH MANAGEMENT.Posting Date 07/24/2026, 06:56 AM.Locations Marylebone Place, 1 Wyndham Street , Londo... Show more

 • Promoted

Director of Platform Eng — AI-Driven, Scalable Infra

Neko HealthGreater London, England, United Kingdom
Full-time

Neko Health is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead the design and scaling of its core infrastructure.This mission-critical role involves ensuring system reliability and enabling fast... Show more

 • Promoted

Principal AI Platform Engineer - AWS, Governance & Scale

DiligentGreater London, England, GB
Full-time

Diligent is seeking a Principal Engineer in Greater London to set the technical direction for their AI-enabled platform.The ideal candidate comes with over 10 years of software engineering experien... Show more