Principal Platform Engineer

Overview

At Automata, we are on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences—from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

We design and operate a software platform that orchestrates robots, instruments, data pipelines, and increasingly AI-driven workflows, helping labs move from bespoke, fragile setups to scalable, software-defined automation. Our systems sit at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, orchestration engines, and real-world physical constraints.

We are a product-driven company operating at scale, with customers doing genuinely meaningful scientific work that saves lives. Our engineering challenges are real: complex workflows, reliability at scale, performance under constraints, and building platforms that can evolve as new products and capabilities are layered on.

We believe great products come from strong technical leadership, clarity of direction, and teams that move  work closely together, value in-person collaboration, and operate from a modern Central London office designed for focus, energy, and momentum.

• Impact:
  Your work will directly contribute to advancements in science and medicine, supporting labs around the globe as they push boundaries in research and innovation.
• Innovation:
  You’ll be part of a team solving complex problems using cutting-edge technology (we have robots).
• Growth:
  We invest in our people. Through hands-on experience, professional development, or collaborative projects, you’ll grow both professionally and personally.
• Community:
  Join a diverse, passionate team that values collaboration and social activities.

We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer who will take full ownership of our platform foundations across cloud and on-prem
, with a mandate to unify, simplify, automate, and harden everything that sits underneath our products. This is a top-end role with final authority over platform architecture, tooling, and standards. You will lead a small group of highly senior platform engineers, shape platform culture and execution, and ensure our infrastructure operates with 99.99% uptime
, at scale, in highly constrained and regulated environments.

You have seen what great looks like and what breaks when shortcuts are taken. You know how to balance startup speed with enterprise-grade reliability, and you care deeply about reducing complexity, cost, and operational drag. The role reports into senior leadership and comes with growth opportunities as the organisation scales.

An outcome-driven platform leader.

• You obsess over reliability, automation, and operational excellence.
• You believe the best platform is often the simplest possible one — fewer tools, fewer vendors, fewer moving parts.
• You are calm under pressure and experienced running systems that must be available 24/7.
• You are opinionated, but grounded in evidence, trade-offs, and real-world constraints.
• You communicate clearly and regularly, providing visibility into platform health, risks, and progress.
• You enjoy leading senior engineers, setting high standards, and building a culture of ownership and accountability.
• You are comfortable working across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise contexts and know which practices belong where.
• You take pride in building platforms that are secure, cost-efficient, low-latency, and boring in the best possible way.

• Own platform architecture and unification
  • Define and own the unified cloud + on-prem platform architecture, spanning AWS and customer-hosted environments.
  • Design systems that operate reliably across hybrid, semiair-gapped, and regulated deployments.
  • Act as the final decision-maker on platform architecture, tooling, and vendors.
• Drive automation-first infrastructure
  • Lead full automation across the platform using Infrastructure as Code, Git Ops, and CI/CD.
  • Ensure environments are reproducible, auditable, and recoverable by design.
  • Eliminate manual operations wherever possible.
• Reliability, uptime &…