Senior Platform Engineer

Ellison Institute of Technology; Oxford; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel allowance

Performance bonus

Pension 7.5%

Life Assurance

Private medical insurance

Employee discounts

Electric car scheme

Nursery

Cycle to Work

Family planning

Neurodiversity support

Coaching & Therapy

Job summary

Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford is recruiting for a SciComp Platform Engineer to build and operate a cloud foundation that accelerates experiments and ensures reliable, secure platforms with self-service guardrails.

You will work with Research and Data teams to support Python notebooks and distributed clusters, delivering scalable infrastructure and auditable pipelines in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in platform engineering and automating operational processes.
• Proactive attitude and habit of introducing automated structure.
• Expertise with major cloud providers (OCI, AWS, GCP or Azure).
• Proficiency with Terraform for large-scale infrastructure provisioning.
• Experience operating large-scale Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience with system-level languages (Python, Go or Java) and scripting.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate cloud platform with resilient compute, network, and storage.
• Drive structured delivery pipelines (CI/CD/GitOps) for auditable changes.
• Design and deploy Policy-as-Code governance and security controls.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and telemetry with clear SLOs.
• Collaborate with Research and Data teams to support diverse workloads.

Job description

Join is at EIT: At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas: Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture Climate Change & Managing CO₂ Artificial Intelligence & Robotics This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas for lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org

Your Role:

Join our SciComp team to build the cloud and compute foundation that enables scientific breakthroughs. Deliver reliable, secure platforms and self-service guardrails that accelerate experimentation and turn ideas into results - faster, at scale, and with confidence.

Your Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, and operate our cloud platform, moving infrastructure beyond the initial setup to deliver resilient compute, network, and storage, including full-sized GPU clusters
• Drive the implementation of highly structured, auditable delivery pipelines (CI/CD/GitOps) using to enforce automated, repeatable infrastructure changes
• Design and deploy automated governance and security controls using Policy-as-Code (specifically Kyverno and YAML) to ensure strong isolation, protect data, and meet internal audit standards
• Establish the foundational monitoring, alerting, and telemetry framework required for robust operations, defining clear SLOs, and setting the course for future SRE work
• Partner with Research and Data teams to build self-service capabilities that efficiently support diverse workloads, from Python notebooks to distributed clusters

Essential Skills, Qualifications & Experience:

• Proven experience platform engineering, with a demonstrable track record of architecting and automating operational processes
• A highly proactive attitude and a passion for introducing and automating operational structure
• Expertise with at least one major cloud provider (OCI, AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Proficiency with Terraform for declarative, large-scale infrastructure provisioning
• Comfortable with operating and managing large-scale, resilient Kubernetes clusters
• Proficiency in at least one major language for system-level tools (e.g. Python, Go, or Java) with some scripting experience

Desirable Skills, Qualifications & Experience:

• Familiarity with modern Policy-as-Code tooling
• A passion for introducing and automating operational rigour and structure
• Experience supporting ML and Data Engineering workloads

We offer the following salary and benefits:

• Competitive salary (dependent on experience) + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday. Our annual leave allowance is 25 days plus 8 bank holidays and an additional 3 days between Christmas and New Year. You will also have the opportunity to purchase an additional 5 days annual leave in January and July.
• Pension - Employer contribution 7.5%, minimum employee contribution 5%
• Life Assurance. Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance as standard for you, your partner and any dependents. Including hospital Cash Plan
• Employee discounts
• Electric car scheme
• Nursery
• Salary Sacrifice scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Family Planning
• Neurodiversity support including advise and assessments
• Coaching & Therapy services

Working together - what it involves: You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary. In certain cases, we can consider sponsorship, and this will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford (or be willing to relocate) and can commit to being onsite at our Oxford office, a minimum of 3 days per working week.