Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

About the role

The owns the definition and execution of platform strategy across NGA and IFS product teams, ensuring the gap between capability and experience is closed. This role integrates authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model while aligning tightly with identity and access management, infrastructure, and SRE teams to maintain coherence. The hire will establish and relentlessly act upon feedback loops from developer surveys, usage analytics, and office hours to prioritise platform improvements based on empirical evidence. Platform strategy will be influenced at the architectural level, with representation in technical leadership forums and active mentorship for Principal and Senior platform engineers to elevate Developer Experience standards. The role involves shipping golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale across distributed engineering teams using an IDP or developer portal owned end-to-end. The Senior Principal Platform Lead will treat internal developers as customers, applying surveys, metrics, and hard prioritisation decisions rooted in data to resolve bottlenecks identified as process issues rather than pipeline issues. The position requires demonstrated comfort with the NGA stack, including Go backend, React / Next.js frontend, Kafka / RedPanda event-driven messaging, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes on AKS, with the ability to learn new elements quickly. Clear communication with engineering leaders and product directors will shape platform strategy beyond task implementation, building trust within large, distributed engineering organisations through consistent delivery and engagement.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and execute platform strategy across NGA and IFS product teams to close the gap between capability and experience as the Senior Principal Platform Lead.

Integrate authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model while aligning with identity and access management, infrastructure, and SRE teams.

Establish feedback loops from developer surveys, usage analytics, and office hours, then act upon them relentlessly to prioritise improvements.

Influence platform strategy at the architectural level with representation in technical leadership forums and mentorship for Principal and Senior platform engineers.

Ship golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale across distributed teams using an IDP or developer portal owned end-to-end.

Treat internal developers as customers by applying surveys, metrics, and data-driven prioritisation to resolve bottlenecks identified as process issues.

Demonstrate deep infrastructure depth in Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability beyond direction into implementation.

Communicate clearly with engineering leaders and product directors to shape platform strategy rather than only implementing tasks, building trust through consistent delivery.

Requirements

The posting states a bachelor's degree requirement. A minimum of 8 years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering is required, with at least 3 years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role focused on deep infrastructure and operations.

An IDP or developer portal has been owned end-to-end, including Backstage, Port, Cortex, or equivalent, with attention to adoption and maintenance in production.

Enterprise-scale developer platform delivery is demonstrated, including explaining why adoption fails even when the technology is sound.

Hands-on infrastructure depth is shown in Kubernetes, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Crossplane), CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability, going beyond direction into deep implementation.

Golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation are shipped at scale across distributed teams.

Internal developers are treated as customers, with surveys, metrics, and hard prioritisation decisions based on data.

Bottlenecks are identified as process issues rather than pipeline issues.

Comfort with the NGA stack is demonstrated or quickly learned, including Go backend, React / Next.js frontend, Kafka / RedPanda event-driven messaging, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes on AKS.

Clear communication with engineering leaders and product directors shapes platform strategy rather than only implementing tasks.

Trust is built within large, distributed engineering organisations through consistent delivery and engagement.

Nice to have

Mentorship and coaching guide Principal and Senior platform engineers to raise the bar on good DX.

Practical notes

Typical interview steps

Data interviews commonly include a SQL or coding exercise, a statistics question, and a case study. Candidates may be asked to design a metric, interpret an experiment, or build a small model. Some companies give a take-home analysis. Expect questions about past projects and the business impact of your work. Interviewers often evaluate how you communicate uncertainty and business impact, not only the math. Bringing a clean write-up of a past analysis to the interview is well received.

Good to know

Platform engineering roles focus on internal services, self-service frameworks, and automation. Toolchains commonly include Kubernetes, GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and observability systems. Success depends on balancing technical depth with communication across distributed teams. Mentorship is a key function for elevating engineering standards and platform adoption. General AI engineering involves building and integrating LLMs and agentic systems into production services.