Senior Principal Platform Lead || AI & Agentic Systems

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