Senior Platform Engineer - Internal Developer Platform

About Frontiers

At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet.

We are one of the world’s largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers.

Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organization at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society. To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video.

At Frontiers, we are rewriting the rules of scientific publishing. To support our scale, we are transforming our Engineering Platform into a state-of-the-art Internal Developer Platform (IDP) built on modern principles and AI-augmented workflows — with a North Star of evolving it into an Agentic Development Platform (ADP) where human engineers and AI agents build software side by side, safely and at scale.

We are looking for a
Senior Platform Engineer —
Internal Developer Platform to help build and run that platform and the AI-First Delivery capabilities on top of it. This is the modern evolution of the Dev Ops Engineer role: you won't run a ticket queue — you'll treat the platform as a product, own a capability area end to end, and ship the golden paths, guardrails and automation that let our Stream‑Aligned Teams (and their agents) deliver faster and more safely.

You'll work closely with our Platform Product Manager and Senior Cloud Architect— turning platform strategy and prioritised needs into working capabilities.

You will build and operate the capabilities that make up the IDP.

• Core Stack:Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), containers (Docker); services in C#/.NET and Node.js.
• IaC & Git Ops:Terraform, Helm, and a move toward Git Ops with ArgoCD.
• CI/CD:Evolution from Azure Dev Ops toward Git Hub Actions, modernizing pipelines (not a blind "lift and shift").
• Integration:Azure API Management, Apollo Federation/GraphOS, n8n.
• Security:Azure Entra , Sonar Qube, Azure Policy, Key Vault.
• Observability:New Relic and Grafana (proactive SRE and business‑value metrics).
• Developer Experience & AI:Backstage, our Technology Framework (policies/standards as executable AI context), MCP, and AI-driven development (e.g. Cursor AI, Git Hub Spec-Kit).

• Build and operate the IDP:golden paths, self-service templates, the developer portal (Backstage) and IDP catalog, and guardrails that keep teams compliant by default (guardrails, not gates).
• Own CI/CD and Git Ops:
  
  Git Hub Enterprise and Git Hub Actions; help drive the migration off Azure Dev Ops; implement Git Ops (ArgoCD) for AKS — rethinking deployments rather than lifting-and-shifting custom tasks.
• Provision cloud infrastructure as code:evolve Azure (AKS, networking, databases, APIM, Key Vault, Entra ) with Terraform and Helm; manage reliability and cost (Fin Ops).
• Improve observability & reliability:instrument systems (New Relic, Grafana), define SLOs, reduce operational toil, and drive monitoring‑cost accountability.
• Advance AI-First Delivery and the ADP:build agent‑ready context (MCP, the Technology Framework), path definitions (e.g. validate-change, PR-review), and agent governance (non‑human identity, sandboxed execution, evaluation, agent observability).
• Own a capability area end to end and set the standard:take a platform domain (e.g. CI/CD & Git Ops, or cloud foundations) from design to run, define the reference patterns and ADRs others build on, and raise the bar through code review, mentoring and pairing.
• Build for adoption, like a product:design capabilities around real internal customers, write docs that work, and gather feedback from the teams you serve — so the platform is genuinely the easiest, safest path. Partner with the…