Senior Systems Engineer: Scale-Driven Performance & Reliability

Graphcore; Bristol; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working

Generous annual leave

Private medical insurance

Health cash plan

Dental plan

Pension (matched 5%)

Life assurance

Income protection

Parental leave

Job summary

Graphcore in Bristol, UK, is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer for Performance & Reliability. You’ll help determine whether racks of machines meet production standards by designing workloads, building experiments, and interpreting results to guide decisions.

The role blends systems engineering with measurement and judgement, with opportunities across infrastructure, workloads, and analysis. Collaboration across teams is key.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience across multiple projects or systems.
• Experience in Linux-based environments, ideally with distributed or high-performance systems.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience with automation and CI/CD (e.g. GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Ability to design, implement and run experiments that produce meaningful results.
• Ability to interpret results and communicate findings clearly, for decision-making.
• Comfortable working where requirements are not fully defined and judgement is needed.
• Experience with large-scale or distributed systems (clusters, cloud, HPC).
• Experience with performance, reliability, or systems-level testing/measurement.
• Familiarity with pytest or similar frameworks for structured testing.
• Experience analysing system behaviour under load (compute, network, or ML workloads).
• Experience working with containerisation, orchestration, or provisioning systems (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenStack).
• Proficiency in other programming languages (e.g. C++).
• Exposure to data analysis, statistics, or interpreting variability in results.

Responsibilities

• Expanding measurement coverage from small clusters to full racks.
• Designing workloads that expose system behaviour.
• Building systems to run experiments across large clusters.
• Interpreting results and defining what "good enough" looks like.

Skills

Software engineering

Linux environments

Python

CI/CD tooling

Experiment design

Results communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Distributed systems

Performance testing

Pytest familiarity

Load analysis

Container orchestration

Other languages

Data analysis

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenStack

Job description

Graphcore in Bristol, UK, is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer for Performance & Reliability. You’ll help determine whether racks of machines meet production standards by designing workloads, building experiments, and interpreting results to guide decisions.

The role blends systems engineering with measurement and judgement, with opportunities across infrastructure, workloads, and analysis. Collaboration across teams is key.