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
£ 105K

Job 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.

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