Principal Platform Engineer - Database at IFS1

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 — IFS's central hosting and services platform, the shared runtime and operational backbone that powers IFS.ai and the broader IFS product suite. Today that's Red Panda and Kafka for event streaming, and the NATS evaluation for next-generation messaging. Tomorrow it's 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 isn't a database, isn't a cluster, and isn't identity, but is a capability that multiple product teams should be able to consume on demand without reinventing it. We're 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. You'll own the Base Technologies subdomain end-to-end — strategy, architecture, delivery, and team health. You'll 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 won't be handed a detailed playbook. You'll be handed a team, a strategic mandate, a technology portfolio that's part-formed and part-waiting-to-be-defined, and the trust to shape it. If you're the kind of person who spots what needs to happen and makes it happen — without waiting to be asked — this is your seat. What you'll 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 team's 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 you'll belong to.