Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer | Kubernetes | Distributed Sy
Optimal IT Recruitment Ltd
Charing Cross, United Kingdom
yesterday
Role details
Contract type
Permanent contract Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours) Working hours
Regular working hours Languages
English Compensation
£ 105KJob location
Charing Cross, United Kingdom
Tech stack
Java
Continuous Integration
Software Debugging
Distributed Systems
Python
Ansible
Large Language Models
Backend
SC Clearance
Kubernetes
Terraform
Docker
Go
Job description
- 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
Requirements
Eligibility:Must hold active UK SC clearance, OR be eligible to obtain it (British Passport, ILR, or Settled Status) (Non-Negotiable), * 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, * 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.
About the company
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.