Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer UK

Full-time /London (Engineering)

About Applied Intuition Defence

Applied Intuition UK is a software and infrastructure supplier that accelerates the deployment of next-generation autonomous capabilities to the warfighter across air, land, sea, and space. A subsidiary of Applied Intuition, we deliver dual-use solutions to national security customers that build upon several years of product development and experience from commercial autonomy programs. Based in London, our seasoned defence team hails from Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, Google, Lockheed Martin, and the UK and US Armed Services. Learn more at appliedintuitiondefense.com.

About the role

As a senior cloud infrastructure engineer on the UK team, your job is to make everyone around you faster. You will be embedded with the engineers you support, not sat in a separate platform silo, and you will feel the same pain they do - which is exactly why you will be the one to fix it. Some days you will be designing UK-hosted infrastructure from a blank page, choosing the tools and the patterns and getting it right from the get-go rather than inheriting somebody else's shortcuts. Other days you will be standing up a secure environment for a customer, debugging a deployment that only misbehaves inside their network, or getting UK-approved AI models serving inside a secure programme. You will also work closely with the infrastructure teams across the rest of Applied Intuition, taking their best ideas, sending yours back, and making sure the UK team is never the one waiting. Our customers are defence primes and national security organisations, and the systems you build are the ones they actually use.

At Applied Intuition, you will:

• Lead the design, development and architecture of the UK-hosted infrastructure used across our internal development teams

• Build and deploy our products into cloud, on-premise and air-gapped environments using infrastructure as code, and support them through their whole operational life

• Host UK securely approved AI models for use in secure programmes

• Improve developer effectiveness by spotting the friction nobody else has bothered to fix and building the tooling that removes it

• Take ownership of our CI/CD systems and deployment strategies, and help wire up Hardware in the Loop (HiL) integration

• Debug and profile the awkward edge cases in distributed systems, and lead the response when something breaks

• Work closely with product managers and customers to understand requirements and translate them into technical solutions

• Contribute your solutions back to the wider organisation and make their products better in the process

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science/related engineering field

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying infrastructure for a production software product

• Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP), and the judgement to know when a managed service is the right answer and when it isn't

• Strong experience designing and building infrastructure with IaC tools such as Terraform, and a preference for describing systems in code over clicking through consoles

• Expertise with Kubernetes, Docker and containerised systems, and experience deploying microservice-based applications on them

• Confidence in one or more scripting languages (Python, Bash, etc.) and with Linux-based operating systems (Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.)

• Proven ability to take initiative in a fast-paced environment, and to leave systems better documented than you found them

Travel Requirements:

• General willingness to travel for company business between our offices, as well as to customer sites

Security Requirements:

• Must have ability to hold UK Security Clearance (current or previous preferred)

Nice to have:

• 7+ years of experience across infrastructure, platform or DevOps roles

• Experience deploying Kubernetes on bare metal or into air-gapped and classified networks

• Familiarity with applying security and regulatory controls, and with vulnerability patching across base OS images, networking and IAM

• Experience with Bazel, Nix and other similar technologies

• Experience serving ML models in production, or building data and real-time analysis pipelines

• Experience working on projects related to national security for one or more government agencies

• Prior work in autonomy, robotics or simulation products

• References who will describe them as low-ego, highly motivated, thoughtfully opinionated, strong communicators and curious listeners