Lead DevOps Engineer

Perceptic; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Perceptic is hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own the end-to-end infrastructure, including secure multi-tenant environments and isolated customer clusters. You will oversee GitOps, Kubernetes on AWS, and IaC pipelines that form the single source of truth for deployments across our platform and client environments.

We expect hands-on engineers with 4+ years delivering production systems, a strong bias for reliability, and a track record in security-conscious settings.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE or infrastructure.
• Own production systems, including multi-tenant/customer-specific environments.
• Fluency with Kubernetes and at least one major cloud (AWS preferred).
• Expertise in GitOps and infrastructure-as-code; good engineering judgment.
• Hands-on approach; not focused on pure architecture.
• Balanced view of speed, security, cost and reliability.
• Bonus: experience with formal security/compliance regimes (SOC2/HIPAA/GxP).

Responsibilities

• Own infrastructure end-to-end: deploy, operate, secure and scale across environments.
• Manage GitOps deployment backbone (Argo CD) and multi-cluster setups.
• Oversee Kubernetes in production (AWS/EKS) across fleets.
• Maintain IaC sources (Terraform/OpenTofu, Terragrunt) as truth for all runtimes.
• Ensure isolation for each customer environment with strong security controls.
• Improve observability, incident response, and runbooks.
• Lead CI/CD and release automation; enhance developer experience.

Skills

DevOps experience

Production systems ownership

Kubernetes & AWS

GitOps & IaC

Hands-on engineering

Security/compliance awareness

Security/compliance regimes (SOC2/HIP?

Tools

Kubernetes (EKS)

AWS

Terraform/OpenTofu

Terragrunt

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.

Who we need

We need a Lead DevOps Engineer to own that infrastructure end to end. You'll be the single, clear owner of how Perceptic deploys, operates, secures, and scales, across our own platform and across the isolated customer environments where the bar for trust is absolute. It's a large amount of responsibility, which is exactly what we're offering.

What you'll own

• Our GitOps deployment backbone on Argo CD, so a small team can ship continuously and safely across many clusters
• Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) across our fleet of production environments
• Infrastructure-as-code in Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt, the source of truth for everything we run
• 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.
• Security and compliance posture: secrets management, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and the SOC2-and-beyond controls that customers will audit you on
• Observability: telemetry, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting that keep a complex distributed system legible
• Reliability, incident response, and the operational runbooks that protect customer trust
• CI/CD and release automation that keep our shipping cadence high
• Developer experience: making it fast and painless for engineers to deploy and debug

What we're looking for

• At least 4 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
• Deep fluency with Kubernetes, a major cloud (AWS preferred), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code, plus the judgment to know when not to add another layer
• 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
• 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

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.