Founding Senior DevOps Engineer

Perceptic; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Perceptic is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to build and run the infrastructure underpinning our AI platform for drug discovery. You’ll own from day one across our platform and client environments, with a clear path to lead the DevOps function.

You’ll deploy GitOps on Argo CD, manage AWS-based Kubernetes (EKS), and drive security, compliance, and reliability across multi-tenant, regulated environments. Join a fast-paced, trust-driven team with high standards.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on production experience with Kubernetes.
• At least 5 years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure.
• Owned production systems, including multi-tenant or customer-specific environments.
• Strong fluency with AWS, GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code.

Responsibilities

• Build and run GitOps deployment backbone on Argo CD.
• Operate Kubernetes on AWS (EKS).
• Own infrastructure-as-code with Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt.
• Deliver multi-tenant, isolated environments for each pharma customer.

Skills

Kubernetes

AWS

GitOps

Infrastructure as Code

Multi-tenant

Terragrunt

ArgoCD

EKS

Security & Compliance

Tools

Argo CD

Terraform

Terragrunt

OpenTofu

EKS

Job description

The highest calling for AI is improving human health. At Perceptic, we're building the AI operating system that powers drug discovery: a unified intelligence layer that connects evidence, reasoning, and action across the entire drug lifecycle.

We were built by operators from Palantir who spent years deploying production AI in the world's most demanding enterprise environments. We know what it takes to make ambitious technology hold up under real pressure. Now we're applying that to pharma, and we're hiring engineers who've operated at the same standard.

A single drug can take more than a decade and billions of dollars to reach a patient, and the systems we build are meant to compress that timeline. They run inside some of the most security-conscious, compliance-bound enterprises in the world, where the infrastructure underneath has to be as trustworthy as the science on top of it.

We're hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to build and run that infrastructure with us. You'll take real ownership from day one across our own platform and the isolated customer environments where the bar for trust is absolute, and you'll grow into owning the whole function.

The path to Lead

This role is designed to become our Lead DevOps Engineer. Over your first 9–12 months you'll take on progressively more of the infrastructure end to end: deployment, operations, security, and scale. Demonstrate the ownership, judgement, and technical depth the role demands, and you'll step into the Lead title, with the scope to shape the infrastructure roadmap and build out the team around you. We'll be explicit about what "ready" looks like, and we'll review progress with you along the way.

What you'll do

• Build and run our GitOps deployment backbone on Argo CD, so a small team can ship continuously and safely across many clusters
• Operate Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) across our fleet of production environments
• Own infrastructure-as-code in Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt, the source of truth for everything we run
• Deliver multi-tenant, per-customer isolation: standing up a fully isolated, compliant environment for each pharma customer, with its own cluster and data plane, and deploying to it with confidence. This is the hardest and most important part of the job.
• Strengthen our security and compliance posture: secrets management, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and the SOC2-and-beyond controls that customers will audit us on
• Build observability that keeps a complex distributed system legible: telemetry, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting
• Drive reliability, incident response, and the operational runbooks that protect customer trust
• Keep our shipping cadence high through CI/CD and release automation
• Improve developer experience, making it fast and painless for engineers to deploy and debug

What we're looking for

Must have

• Deep, hands-on production experience with Kubernetes. You've run it at scale, debugged it under pressure, and understand it well beyond deploying manifests. This is non-negotiable.
• At least 5 years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure
• You've owned production systems rather than only contributing to them, including multi-tenant or customer-specific environments, and you understand the complexity that comes with them
• Strong fluency with a major cloud (AWS preferred), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code, plus the judgement to know when not to add another layer

What good looks like

• You come from somewhere that held a high bar, and you expect engineering excellence from yourself and the systems around you
• You're hands-on and have no interest in a purely architectural role. You explain complex tradeoffs simply and you don't over-engineer.
• You treat speed, security, cost, and reliability as constraints that all apply at once, and you've struck that balance before
• You want to lead. Not necessarily to manage a large team tomorrow, but to own outcomes, set standards, and be the person others come to when infrastructure decisions matter.

Bonus

• You've operated under formal security or compliance regimes (SOC2, HIPAA, GxP, or similar) and know how to make controls a strength rather than a tax
• Experience with Argo CD, EKS, or Terragrunt specifically

What it's like here

This is a high-intensity, high-stakes role. We move quickly and give direct feedback, the responsibility you carry will likely outrun your title, and you'll go wherever the company needs you most, which sometimes means unglamorous work that matters more than anything else that week. The people who do well here find that kind of ownership and growth exciting, and they weren't looking for a nine-to-five.