Platform Engineering Manager - Internal Developer Platform

At Frontiers Media, we are rewriting the rules of scientific publishing. Our Internal Developer Platform helps engineering teams move faster through golden paths, self-service capabilities, and built-in guardrails, while supporting a broader vision for an AI-first, governed Agentic Engineering Platform.

This is an opportunity to shape a platform at the centre of how engineering happens at Frontiers. You will help create the foundations that enable teams to build, ship, and operate with confidence while balancing speed, reliability, and governance in an evolving agent-enabled environment.

As Platform Engineering Manager - Internal Developer Platform, you will lead a high-impact team responsible for the platform capabilities that support engineering teams across the organization. You will guide delivery and technical direction, support the growth of your team, and work closely with platform, product, and cloud architecture partners to evolve the platform toward safe, scalable agent-enabled workflows. Few companies have turned an IDP into an Agentic Engineering Platform yet. You'll do it with a clear mandate from top management, and with the team that already owns AI-First Delivery at Frontiers. Platform engineering gets more valuable in the agentic era, not less: the platform does most of the work and the model a small part, and the throughput of many agents working in parallel is a property of the platform, not of the model. You'll lead the people who make agents safe and useful for every engineering team - all in service of a mission that matters: making science open for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team that builds and operates Frontiers’ Internal Developer Platform and evolves it into an AI-first, governed Agentic Engineering Platform.
• Own team delivery, technical direction, and people development.
• Partner in a delivery triad with the Platform Product Manager, Senior Platform Engineers, and Senior Cloud Architect.
• Ensure deterministic capabilities-including CI/CD, policy gates, and deployments-remain reliable while adding path specifications, agent infrastructure, governance, and model access for safe probabilistic and hybrid workflows.
• Oversee a platform environment spanning Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Backstage, Azure API Management, SonarQube, Entra ID, Key Vault, Azure Policy, New Relic, Grafana, C#/.NET, and Node.js.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure roles, with proven platform engineering leadership across team delivery, technical direction, and people development.
• 3+ years of experience directly managing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Track record of building or running an Internal Developer Platform and growing its adoption, supported by measures such as DORA metrics, adoption metrics, or satisfaction metrics.
• Hands-on experience with coding agents, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong practical experience applying CI/CD, GitOps, and policy as code in production environments.
• Deep understanding that increases in agent autonomy must be matched by appropriate governance and guardrails, with experience in governance and security for agent-enabled engineering platforms.
• Experience applying evals, retries, and stopping conditions for agent-enabled workflows, along with cost awareness for token spend, including model routing, caching, and smaller context.
• Experience partnering with Security and communicating the value of platform work and the risks of agents to both engineers and executives.
• Professional-level English, spoken and written.
• Eligibility to work in Spain or Poland.

Nice to haves

• Experience at Level 2 or 3 of agentic software development: agents opening pull requests in parallel, background agents, CI failures fixed by agents, or work started from signals such as a vulnerability advisory.
• Hands-on with agent evaluation (goldens, rubrics, LLM judges, replay; e.g. Braintrust, LangSmith), workflow orchestration (e.g. LangGraph, Temporal, n8n) or model gateways.
• Cursor at team scale (rules, skills, plugins, cloud agents, Bugbot), or Claude Code, Codex or GitHub Copilot's coding agent.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, AKS, Entra ID workload identities and GitHub Actions, and with .NET/C# environments.
• Spec-Driven Development: PRDs and SDDs as agents' input (e.g. GitHub Spec-Kit).
• Talks, write-ups or open-source work on agent platforms (MCP servers, agent tooling); familiarity with the platformengineering.org and Weave Intelligence reference architectures, Team Topologies, DORA and DX Core 4.
• Background in Scientific Publishing.

How We Measure Success in This Role

• Delivery (DORA): lead time, deployment frequency and change failure rate improve, for changes agents write too: a growing share of agent-written changes without a higher change failure rate.
• Agentic maturity: agent paths in production and the level of autonomy they run at; the share of generated code that goes through a governed path.
• Agent quality & cost: success rate of agent runs, acceptance and revert rates of agent changes, review overhead, cost per merged pull request, and spend within budget.
• Governance: every agent has an identity, a scope and a budget, and every agent run can be traced: who acted, with what, at what cost.
• Adoption & developer experience: teams on golden paths and agent paths, developer satisfaction, fewer shadow tools.
• People: team health, retention and growth; engineers who own paths, agents and feedback loops.

Benefits

• We prioritise office presence and emphasise in-person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy
• Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance
• Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year
• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal and financial support)
• Learning and development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub
• Competitive local benefits country dependent (e.g. healthcare and pension/retirement provision)

Frontiers actively embraces diversity and is a safe and welcoming workplace. Recruitment is free from discrimination - including based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. With employees from more than 50 different nations, our diversity creates vibrant teams and constantly challenges us to appreciate multiple perspectives.