Principal Platform Engineer || Agentic AI || Identity and Access Management

IFS

19h•Hybrid

About The Position

As Principal Platform Engineer - Identity & Access Management, you will be the technical authority on authorisation (AuthZ) and authentication (AuthN) across the Kairos and Nexus platforms. You will architect, engineer, and operate enterprise-scale identity and access solutions that secure the IFS platform while remaining frictionless for the developers and end-users who rely on them. This is one of two Principal Platform Engineers being hired into the Identity & Access Management domain, with a strong emphasis on unifying authorisation across IFS hosting environments. The authorisation problem is complex and high-stakes: it must work consistently across Nexus, F1, and LEC, it must scale to enterprise, multi-tenant workloads, and it is currently a blocker for NGA (Kairos) adoption. You will work directly with the team building this today (the Authorisation subdomain under Udayanga Silva) and own the technical outcome. This is a hands-on engineering role with significant architectural scope. You will design and implement IAM patterns that are adopted as standards across IFS, and you will work closely with platform, product, and security teams to ensure identity and access are enablers, not bottlenecks.

Requirements

Architecting and engineering fine-grained authorisation systems at production scale, in distributed, multi-tenant environments
Hands-on production experience with a relationship-based / policy-based authorisation engine, ideally SpiceDB (or comparable Zanzibar-inspired systems such as OpenFGA, Ory Keto, or equivalent)
Deep, practical knowledge of authorisation models: relationship-based access control (ReBAC), role-based (RBAC), and attribute-based (ABAC), and knowing when to apply each
Experience designing authorisation schemas and permission models, and reasoning about correctness, latency, and consistency at scale
Familiarity with policy-as-code approaches and tooling (OPA / Rego, Cedar, or equivalent)
Understanding of the operational side: running the authorisation engine in production, backed by PostgreSQL, with observability and traceability of authorisation decisions
Architecting and engineering enterprise-scale AuthN solutions, demonstrated at production scale
Hands-on production experience with Curity and/or Keycloak: configuration, customisation, operations, and integration
Deep, practical knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML 2.0, and token-based authentication patterns (JWT, opaque tokens, token introspection)
Experience with enterprise identity federation, SSO, and directory integration (LDAP, Active Directory)
Strong hands-on engineering capability across the NGA stack, or the ability to get there fast: Backend: Go
Messaging / Streaming: Apache Kafka / RedPanda
Data: PostgreSQL
Comfortable operating in a cloud-native environment: Kubernetes (AKS), containers, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code
Event-driven and distributed systems architecture
Secure coding practices and security-by-design principles
Demonstrable, hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications. Candidates whose AI experience is limited to using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot to assist software development, without demonstrable experience building AI-powered products or systems, will not meet the requirements for this role.

Responsibilities

Architect and engineer the unified, enterprise-scale authorisation platform across Nexus, F1, and LEC, built on SpiceDB
Design and implement fine-grained authorisation models: relationship-based access control (ReBAC / Zanzibar-inspired), alongside RBAC and ABAC where appropriate
Model authorisation schemas, relationships, and permission checks that are correct, performant, and maintainable at scale
Own the operation of the authorisation engine: SpiceDB on PostgreSQL, including the migration to cloud-native Postgres (CNPG) and blue-green deployment support
Build the authorisation APIs and SDKs that product teams consume, making correct access control the path of least resistance
Architect and engineer enterprise-scale AuthN solutions, and own the implementation, configuration, and operation of identity provider infrastructure, specifically Curity and/or Keycloak
Implement and enforce OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and SAML patterns at scale, including token lifecycle management and claims-based authorisation
Define IAM patterns, standards, and golden paths for product teams to implement securely and consistently
Integrate identity and access services with the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to enable self-service authentication and authorisation configuration
Provide subject-matter expertise on identity and access security to product teams, architects, and security stakeholders
Maintain platform identity and access service reliability, performance, and security posture
Contribute to the broader platform engineering roadmap with an identity-and-access-first perspective