Principal Infrastructure and Applications Engineer (Forward Deployed)

Principal Infrastructure and Applications Engineer (Forward Deployed)

Department: Tech Services

Employment Type: Fixed Term - Full Time

Location: West Midlands, UK

Compensation: GBP 75,000 - GBP 120,000 / year

Description

About Rowden
We're building the next UK-headquartered engineering powerhouse. At Rowden, we design and integrate advanced systems that sense, connect, and protect data in challenging environments where quick decisions are vital. Our solutions use intelligent automation to enhance speed and efficiency and are built to be reliable and straightforward for critical operations in remote or high-pressure settings.

Headquartered in Bristol (UK), we combine modern engineering methods with cutting-edge commercial technology to create adaptable, mission-critical systems. We focus on solving the tough challenges that others overlook, ensuring our customers can operate effectively in an ever-changing world.

Our team of Forward Deployed Specialists
Join Rowden's Forward Deployed Team and work where the action is. You'll collaborate directly with customers on-site, tackling their most complex technology challenges. From diagnosing critical issues to deploying innovative solutions, you'll be at the forefront of solving real-world problems that matter. If you're hands-on, thrive in fast-paced environments, and want to see the impact of your work up close - this is the team for you.

What's in it for you:

1. Impact and Purpose: Your work makes a difference - directly supporting defence, national security, and frontline operators.
2. Professional Growth: Experience faster learning, deeper technical challenges, and exposure to real-world constraints that sharpen your skills.
3. Team Expansion: Be part of a growing team that's delivering results and scaling up. Help us shape what forward deployment looks like as we expand into new projects and new regions.

The role: Principal Infrastructure and Applications Engineer
We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to join our dynamic team at Rowden Technologies on a fixed term basis supporting one of our most important customers. This key position requires a dynamic, customer focused engineer capable of designing, developing, building, deploying and supporting mission critical services across a range on cloud infrastructure (focussed on AWS).

Your initial deployment is anticipated to be on-site in the West Midlands for one year, working within a hybrid team of contractors and military personnel for a government organisation. While this role offers hybrid working options, it requires a minimum of 3 days per week on-site with the customer. Candidates must be willing to obtain a UKNSV security clearance with SC being essential, and DV clearance desirable.

More information about security clearance is available here: Security Clearance Information

Key Areas of Responsibility
As a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Rowden, your expertise will be pivotal in building and architecting solutions that support both our operational needs and strategic objectives.

Your key responsibilities will include:

1. Workload integration, deployment, documentation and subsequent monitoring and patching, ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of services.
2. Collaborating with development teams to integrate DevOps methodologies and practice into the software development lifecycle.
3. Interfacing with our account manager on progress updates and upcoming customer needs.

About You

Key skills, experience and behaviours
We are looking for someone who is passionate about technology and who actively invests in their technical skills and abilities. You'll gain loads of experience in this role but before you do, you should have:

1. Public Cloud Expertise: Experience across multiple cloud platforms, with a focus on AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, CloudFormation)
2. Proven Customer Focus: Direct experience of being the face of an organisation to customers - and those customers being delighted by your work.
3. Expertise in infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform and Ansible and experience using Python, Golang or other object oriented programming languages.
4. Comprehensive knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, and container technologies; Docker, Podman, orchestration tools such as Kubernetes and version control systems such as Git.
5. Strong grounding in IT security practices, including application hardening and secure software development lifecycles.

Key attributes
The ideal candidate will have a strong balance of technical skills and experience, and should be comfortable:

1. Planning complex solution architectures at both a broad and detailed level.
2. Explaining those plans to business stakeholders of varying technical levels.
3. Taking complete ownership of architecture designs and delivery, including managing a team (if required) for highly secure environments.
4. Providing clear documentation and architecture diagrams, including governance, policies and runbooks.
5. Presenting and knowledge sharing skills, using whiteboards and other tools, with the ability to work effectively internally, with partners and with customers.

Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!

Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.

Finally, if you feel that you don't meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we'd still love to hear from you!