Kubernetes & HPC Infra Engineer

Wave Photonics; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company share options

Enhanced annual leave 25 days + bank-h

Cycle to work scheme

Job summary

Wave Photonics in Cambridge, UK is seeking a skilled Infrastructure Engineer to build and operate a cloud-backed HPC environment for heavy design and simulation workloads. The role spans on‑prem and cloud, unified under Kubernetes, with emphasis on security and a reliable, self‑service platform.

You will own the compute platform, observability, data infrastructure, and security, enabling scalable, automated workflows while maintaining strong safeguards and ease of use for the team.

Qualifications

• Experience running Kubernetes in production, ideally including bare metal.
• Cloud-native mindset: you think in Kubernetes and treat on-prem machines as just another part of the cluster.
• Some Linux sysadmin experience, to manage our bare metal boxes.
• Comfortable with compute-heavy, batch-style workloads.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Willingness to take ownership and make pragmatic calls.
• Ability to architect robust/reliable systems and care about the experience of the people relying on your infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• The compute platform – Kubernetes across on-prem and cloud, run as one coherent system, including cloud bursting.
• Observability – Monitoring and alerting to pre-empt issues.
• Data infrastructure – Reliable, well-organised storage and access for large scientific datasets, with backups you can trust.
• Security – Ensuring security (RBAC, secrets, policies, zero trust networking) across the stack.

Skills

Kubernetes in production

Linux system administration

Compute-heavy workloads

Cloud-native mindset

Ownership & pragmatic decision-making

Architecture robust/reliable systems

Batch workloads

Tools

Terraform

Job description

Wave Photonics in Cambridge, UK is seeking a skilled Infrastructure Engineer to build and operate a cloud-backed HPC environment for heavy design and simulation workloads. The role spans on‑prem and cloud, unified under Kubernetes, with emphasis on security and a reliable, self‑service platform.

You will own the compute platform, observability, data infrastructure, and security, enabling scalable, automated workflows while maintaining strong safeguards and ease of use for the team.