Principal Platform Engineer Database

Platform Engineering at IFS is the team that makes all of that possible behind the scenes. We build and run the shared foundations compute data identity messaging developer tooling that every IFS product is built on. Our mission is to treat the platform as a product: self-service well-documented reliable by default and a genuine accelerator for the engineering teams that depend on it. We work in the open we automate relentlessly and we take pride in the invisible plumbing that lets IFS move at scale.

About the role

Base Technologies is the foundational capability subdomain of Nexus IFSs central hosting and services platform the shared runtime and operational backbone that powers and the broader IFS product suite.

Today thats Red Panda and Kafka for event streaming and the NATS evaluation for next-generation messaging. Tomorrow its whatever new shared capability the platform needs to package and serve external API gateways email and notification services shared storage shared workflow engines anything that isnt a database isnt a cluster and isnt identity but is a capability that multiple product teams should be able to consume on demand without reinventing it.

Were looking for a Domain Owner for Base Technologies: a hands-on technical leader whose real specialisation is platform engineering as a product someone who understands how to take a raw piece of technology and wrap it into a capability that product teams can adopt easily safely and at scale.

This is a Principal-level Architect / Team Lead role. Youll own the Base Technologies subdomain end-to-end strategy architecture delivery and team health. Youll partner with your Program Manager with the Database and Infrastructure domain leaders and with engineering leadership across the product teams who consume your platforms.

We care about the quality of your experience not just the years. A senior engineer with four years of deep deliberate platform-engineering work is more interesting than someone with fifteen years of incidental exposure.

Above all this role is for someone with high agency a genuine self-starter who sees an open canvas and wants to put their own stamp on it. You wont be handed a detailed playbook. Youll be handed a team a strategic mandate a technology portfolio thats part-formed and part-waiting-to-be-defined and the trust to shape it. If youre the kind of person who spots what needs to happen and makes it happen without waiting to be asked this is your seat.

What youll own

The Platform Product Mindset

This is the centre of gravity for the role.

• Treat every technology in the subdomain as a product with users (product teams) a contract a lifecycle and an adoption story.
• Build self-service capabilities that teams can consume without tickets without meetings and without hand-holding.
• Define and enforce golden paths the well-trodden well-supported way to use each capability while leaving room for edge cases to be handled deliberately.
• Invest in developer experience: clear contracts examples integration templates documentation and office-hours support rather than bespoke engagement.
• Measure adoption reliability and the cost per team and make that visible to the organisation.

Architecture & Delivery

• Architect and evolve the current Base Technologies portfolio: Red Panda and Kafka for event streaming today NATS under evaluation for tomorrow.
• Own the decision framework for adding new capabilities to the subdomain what belongs here what belongs in a product teams stack when to build vs buy and when to retire something.
• Plan for the next wave of shared capabilities as platform needs emerge e.g. external API gateways email / notification services shared workflow or job-orchestration services shared storage patterns.
• Resolve the existing technical debt: inconsistent operational patterns across Red Panda and Kafka DR gaps capacity management by gut-feel rather than telemetry and a long tail of non-production-ready configuration from earlier adoption waves.
• Define and evangelise integration patterns event-driven designs schema governance idempotency observability hooks.

Platform Engineering Fundamentals

• Declarative GitOps-style configuration for every capability the domain offers.
• Automation-first provisioning patching scaling and DR R&D does not operate production directly so operational excellence has to be baked into the platform itself not left to manual runbooks.
• Partner with the infrastructure team (who own the AKS fabric) to deploy your capabilities cleanly onto the cluster platform and with the operations function on the live-service side.
• First-class observability for everything the subdomain runs metrics logs traces SLOs.

Technical Leadership

• Lead and mentor the subdomain squad around a dozen engineers working alongside an embedded Engineering Lead. Your job is to raise the engineering bar sharpen technical direction and protect focus time against competing priorities.
• Own the overall quality of technical output from the squad design standards code review culture test coverage operational readiness you set and uphold the bar.
• Work closely with your Program Manager to sequence and schedule delivery across the active portfolio.
• Collaborate closely with adjacent Domain Owners databases infrastructure developer-tooling and the product-side consumers of your platforms.
• Champion modern standards for messaging and platform capabilities (CloudEvents schema registries idempotency exactly-once semantics where appropriate) without being fashion-driven.

Strategy & Roadmapping

• Own the Base Technologies roadmap aligning it with Nexus platform priorities cost targets and customer requirements.
• Run credible evaluations of emerging technologies (NATS is the current example) structured trade-off analysis not vendor theatre.
• Contribute to broader platform strategy as part of the primary domain leadership group youll belong to.

Qualifications :

Must-have

• Platform engineering experience youve worked on an internal developer platform a paved-road team or a shared-services organisation that treated its output as a product for other engineers to consume.
• Deep demonstrable experience with at least one modern messaging / event-streaming platform at scale Kafka Red Panda NATS Pulsar RabbitMQ or similar.
• Strong grasp of the platform-as-a-product playbook golden paths self-service provisioning developer experience adoption metrics internal SLAs.
• Deep production experience on a major cloud Azure preferred (AKS-hosted workloads Key Vault managed storage Front Door); AWS/GCP transferable.
• Strong software engineering foundations (Java Go Python or similar server-side languages). This is a technical leadership role you still read and write code.
• Kubernetes-native operational experience Helm operators CRDs stateful workloads.
• Experience leading and mentoring engineers either as a tech lead principal or hands-on engineering manager.

Nice-to-have

• Experience building and running capability services beyond messaging e.g. API gateways email / notification platforms workflow engines shared storage services.
• Exposure to observability tooling (Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry Datadog Splunk).
• Experience with change data capture schema registries stream processing (Kafka Streams Flink).
• Background in compliance-heavy environments (SOC 2 ISO 27001 FedRAMP).
• Contributions to open-source platform or messaging projects or published writing / speaking on platform engineering topics.

How you work

• Product thinking. You treat internal engineers as customers not ticket sources.
• Automation-first. If you find yourself doing the same thing twice youre looking for how to codify it.
• Pragmatic. You balance ideal architecture with whats deliverable and you know technical debt is a choice you make that choice deliberately.
• Collaborative. Base Technologies is a cross-cutting concern; you influence rather than mandate and you build allies across engineering and product.
• Clear communicator. You can explain a nuanced trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder and get them to the right decision.
• Team-focused. You grow the engineers around you. The squads output is your output.

Why this role

• Genuine platform ownership. You arent a cog you own the subdomain set direction and decide what goes in it.
• Strategic leverage. Platform engineering is a multi-year programme at IFS. Your work underpins every service running on Nexus (IFSs central hosting platform) and shapes how product teams consume shared capabilities for years to come.
• A team to build on. The squad has strong engineers and a capable Engineering Lead youll focus them and sharpen their impact.
• Modern stack real scale. Azure AKS Red Panda Kafka OpenTelemetry and whatever comes next serving hundreds of customers across the IFS product suite.

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.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time