Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer | Kubernetes | Distributed Sy

Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer | Kubernetes | Distributed Systems | Python / Go | Must Hold or Be Eligible for SC Clearance Salary: £90,000 - £105,000  RSUs Start: ASAP Working Model:
Hybrid 1-2 days p/w in London (in-office for secure work and on-call)

Location:

London, UK Relocation:
Support available for candidates outside London Eligibility:
Must hold active UK SC clearance, OR be eligible to obtain it (British Passport, ILR, or Settled Status) (Non-Negotiable) Non-Negotiables - Please only apply if you have ALL of the following Core technologies:
Kubernetes and containerisation (Docker, orchestration at scale) Hands-on production infrastructure experience Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar) Proficient in Python, Go, Java, or a comparable backend language CI/CD pipeline design and delivery Environment:
Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-autonomy environment Proven track record building and deploying production systems, not just maintaining them Able to own reliability, monitoring, and operations end-to-end Happy to participate in an on-call rotation Eligibility to hold UK SC clearance (British Passport, ILR, or Settled Status) Key skills:
Production-grade infrastructure design, deployment, and scaling Strong Kubernetes and containerisation depth Modern automation and IaC tooling Solid understanding of distributed systems On-call and incident response experience Confident debugging and optimising across the stack Able to work UK hours and hybrid in London

Role Overview We're partnered with a publicly listed technology company building mission-critical software for some of the most important institutions in the world. This is a forward-deployed infrastructure role where you'll operate at startup speed inside a high-security, high-impact environment - owning reliability, deployments, and automation for systems where uptime genuinely matters. This is a hands-on role focused on production infrastructure, system reliability, and scaling operations, working closely with product and delivery teams in a high-ownership setting with minimal bureaucracy.

Key Responsibilities Build, operate, and maintain high-performance, scalable, and reliable production infrastructure Own reliability end-to-end including monitoring, alerting, config management, and upgrades Deploy new products and run migrations across production environments Lead automation efforts to reduce manual toil and improve resilience Debug, harden, and optimise services with a focus on long-term reliability Participate in an on-call rotation (roughly every 5-6 weeks) for production support Partner with delivery and product teams on sensible, scalable systems design Nice to Have Background in defence tech or another high-complexity technical organisation Experience at a major cloud or big-tech company Exposure to modern LLM / AI tooling Distributed systems design experience Prior SRE or on-call rotation ownership If you've built and run production infrastructure at scale and want to work on systems that actually matter, let's talk.