Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Location:

UK (occasional office travel) |

Employment Type:

Full-time, Permanent |

Reports to:

Engineering Manager

We’re looking for a Principal Infrastructure Engineer in our Platform team to drive the architecture, design, and implementation of our next-generation AI-native cloud platform. You will analyse cutting-edge technologies, design scalable and resilient infrastructure solutions, and lead their implementation across a globally distributed environment. You’ll combine deep technical expertise with solution-focused leadership, you will enable our infrastructure to power HPC and AI/ML workloads, delivering value through innovation and collaboration.

• Architect, design and implement virtualisation solutions optimised for AI-native workloads, focusing on HPC environments and hypervisor tuning.

• Design infrastructure that dynamically adjusts to meet customer demands for storage and networking resources, ensuring resilience and scalability.

• Lead the lifecycle management of bare-metal hardware, ensuring efficient provisioning, orchestration, and optimisation.

• Maintain deep expertise in Unix/Linux systems, delivering secure, performant configurations at scale.

• Design and implement high-performance, cloud-native storage and networking solutions for demanding workloads.

• Apply advanced knowledge of networking protocols (TCP, UDP, DNS, encryption) and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies.

• Deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, leveraging CNIs and service meshes.

• Architect scalable CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure delivery and ensure reliable global operations.

• Kubernetes security hardening (RBAC, PSA/PSP successors, network policies, admission controllers - OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverino)

• Secrets management and rotation across clusters (Vault/Open Bao, sealed-secrets, external-secrets patterns)

• Supply chain security — image scanning, signed artifacts (cosign/sigstore), provenance attestation

• IAM and least-privilege design across bare-metal, cluster, and cloud control planes

• Build observability pipelines to monitor and troubleshoot global systems, integrating tools for logs,metrics, and tracing.

• Create automation frameworks to reduce operational toil, streamline deployments, and enhance scalability using tools like Terraform, Ansible, Go, and Python.

• Analyse emerging technologies and assess their potential fit within our platform, considering scalability, security, and performance.

• Develop high- and low-level architectural proposals, balancing technical and business requirements.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure successful implementation of infrastructure solutions.

• Provide thought leadership on architecture best practices, driving alignment across engineering and product teams.

• Foster a 'how do we achieve this?' mindset, championing a positive, solution-oriented approach to challenges.

• Mentor and guide team members in architectural principles, emerging technologies, and best practices.

• Partner with engineering leaders and stakeholders to align infrastructure projects with broader organisational goals.

• Proven experience in infrastructure architecture and solution design, including the ability to produce detailed technical proposals.

• Demonstrated success in evaluating and adopting new toolsets and technologies.

• Extensive expertise in large-scale global infrastructure deployments, particularly in AI-native, HPC, and cloud-native…