Senior Principal Platform Lead

November 6, 2026

Hybrid

Senior

Madrid, Spain

Indeed

Also worth knowing

Mandatory office attendance
Includes on-call duty

Description

Senior individual contributor role focused on building a greenfield Internal Developer Platform from scratch — vision, roadmap, service catalogue, golden paths and developer portals. The position combines architectural strategy with hands-on delivery: the owner writes code, defines platform standards and drives adoption across distributed product teams. Deep infrastructure experience is essential, including production Kubernetes, and the role requires demonstrable hands-on experience shipping production AI applications.

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 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 rather than mandated
Drive measurable adoption through onboarding time, self-service completion rates, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment and DORA metrics
Integrate authentication and authorisation services into the IDP self-service model
Work directly with product teams and R&D domain teams to understand where they struggle and prioritise what to fix
Partner with IAM, infrastructure and SRE teams to keep the developer-facing surface coherent, reliable and secure
Establish feedback loops, developer surveys, usage analytics and office hours, and act on them relentlessly
Influence platform strategy at architectural level and represent the developer platform in technical leadership forums
Mentor and technically guide Principal and Senior platform engineers to raise the bar on good DX
Make the case for the platform to product managers and engineering leaders in plain language

Requirements

8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior/staff IC or technical lead role
End-to-end ownership of an IDP or developer portal such as Backstage, Port, Cortex or equivalent
Shipped developer platforms into production at enterprise scale and knows why adoption fails even when technology is right
Hands-on infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform or Crossplane, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management and observability
Production Kubernetes experience — deployed to it, operated it, and been there when it broke
Shipped golden paths, service templates and CI/CD standardisation at scale
Demonstrable hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications
Comfortable with Go backend, React and Next.js frontend, Kafka or RedPanda, PostgreSQL on Kubernetes AKS
Treats internal developers as customers — has run surveys, tracked metrics and made data-driven prioritisation calls
Knows when the bottleneck is a process rather than a pipeline
Clear communication with engineering leaders and product directors in plain language
Experience working in a large distributed engineering organisation and building platform trust