Senior Principal Platform Lead (Internal Developer Platform)

Location: Dublin, Ireland; hybrid

Company

hirify.global builds AI-native, cloud-based enterprise software for asset, operations, and critical-service management at global scale.

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, and hirify.global R&D domains to deliver integrated developer experiences.
• Define platform standards, integrate authentication and authorisation into self-service workflows, and partner with IAM, infrastructure, and SRE teams on secure, reliable developer-facing services.
• Drive adoption through onboarding time, self-service completion, platform NPS, time-to-first-deployment, DORA metrics, surveys, usage analytics, and office hours.
• Influence platform strategy, represent developer platforms 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 failure modes.
• Hands-on depth in Kubernetes, including production deployment and operations, plus GitOps, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform or Crossplane, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability.
• Experience shipping golden paths, service templates, and CI/CD standardisation at scale.
• Experience treating internal developers as customers, running surveys, tracking metrics, and prioritising improvements from data.
• Ability to work with Go, React or Next.js, Kafka or RedPanda, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes on AKS; partial stack coverage is acceptable if the platform experience is strong.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping production AI applications, with specific examples of AI tools used and their limitations.
• Clear communication with engineering leaders and product directors, experience explaining technical work in plain language, and experience in a large distributed engineering organisation.
• Profiles focused only on infrastructure administration, release engineering, CI/CD ownership, monitoring, or incident response without developer-facing platform ownership are not suitable.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work opportunities with flexibility balanced with in-person workplace experiences.
• Individual contributor role with no team to delegate to; leadership is exercised through technical direction and influence.
• Work in a global, diverse engineering environment focused on collaboration, inclusion, sustainability, and practical impact.
• Opportunity to build AI-native enterprise software using large language models, agentic AI, and cloud-native technologies.

Hiring process

• In the application, describe what developers used to create a new service before the platform was built and what they had to do manually.
• Provide concrete examples of the developer portal or Internal Developer Platform operated, its catalogue contents, production Kubernetes experience, and specific AI tools used, including their limitations.