Senior Principal Platform Lead (Internal Developer Platform)

Location: Madrid, Madrid, Spain; hybrid

Company

hirify.global develops cloud-based enterprise software for asset, operations, and critical-service management, with a focus on AI-native products, large language models, agentic AI, and cloud-native technologies.

What you will do

• Own the vision, roadmap, and end-to-end execution of a greenfield Internal Developer Platform, including the service catalogue, self-service scaffolding, golden paths, CI/CD integration, and developer portals.
• Own the developer experience for the Nexus platform from service creation through production observability.
• Work across Kairos, Nexus, Auth, Base Tech, NGA product teams, hirify.global R&D domains, IAM, infrastructure, and SRE to deliver coherent, reliable, and secure developer experiences.
• Define platform standards, integrate authentication and authorization into self-service workflows, and drive adoption through onboarding metrics, self-service completion, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment, and DORA metrics.
• Establish feedback loops through surveys, usage analytics, office hours, and prioritization based on developer needs.
• Influence architectural strategy, represent the developer platform in technical leadership forums, and mentor Principal and Senior platform engineers without direct management responsibility.

Requirements

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling engineering, including at least 3 years in a senior/staff individual contributor or technical lead role.
• End-to-end ownership of an Internal Developer Platform or developer portal such as Backstage, Port, Cortex, or an equivalent, including adoption and maintenance.
• Experience bringing developer platforms into production at enterprise scale and understanding adoption challenges.
• Deep hands-on infrastructure and operational experience with Kubernetes, including production deployment and operation; Kubernetes is required.
• Hands-on experience with GitOps, Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or Crossplane, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability.
• Experience shipping golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardization at scale.
• Experience treating internal developers as customers, running surveys, tracking metrics, and making prioritization decisions from data.
• Ability to work with or quickly learn Go for backend, React and Next.js for frontend, Kafka or RedPanda for event-driven systems, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes on AKS.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping production AI applications, with concrete examples of AI tools used and their limitations.
• Clear communication with engineering leaders and product directors, including explaining technical work to non-technical stakeholders; experience in a large, distributed engineering organization.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work opportunities with flexibility alongside in-person workplace experiences.
• Individual contributor position with no team to delegate to, requiring hands-on coding and automation by default.
• Opportunity to work on AI-native enterprise software using LLMs, agentic AI, and cloud-native technologies.
• International, diverse engineering environment focused on collaboration, sustainability, and trust.

Hiring process

• Applications should explain what developers used to create a new service before the candidate's platform was built and what the candidate built to change that experience.
• Applications should provide concrete examples of AI tools used, their purpose, and their limitations.