Senior Platform Engineer

Automata; London; On-site; GBP 95,000 - 105,000; Full time

Job description

Level: 4

Salary band: £95,000-£105,000

Bonus: 8% performance-based, discretionary

Location: Hybrid, work from our London HQ 2x/week

At Automata, we're on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences—from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

But we’re more than just a company disrupting the industry—we're a team of innovators, problem-solvers, and creators passionate about empowering scientists. Our LINQ platform combines hardware and software to streamline workflows, making lab automation fast, flexible, and affordable. This means our customers can focus on groundbreaking research, while we take care of the rest.

Why Work at Automata?

• Impact: Your work will directly contribute to advancements in science and medicine, supporting labs around the globe as they push boundaries in research and innovation.
• Innovation: You’ll be part of a team solving complex problems using cutting-edge technology.
• Growth: We invest in our people. Whether through hands-on experience, professional development, or collaborative projects, you’ll grow both professionally and personally.
• Community: Join a diverse, passionate team that values collaboration.

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer based in London to join our Platform Engineering Team to develop and support the running of our infrastructure and platform at the edge.

Our mission is to build lab automation products at the intersection of hardware and software in the life-sciences automation space that can transform the industry, accelerating science.

About the team

Our engineers are more than just technically skilled; they're driven by curiosity and a growth mindset. They find immense joy in seeing the software power the robots and the hardware bench, transporting plates from instrument to instrument.

The core skills we’d like to see:

• Significant cloud expertise with AWS, including ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, IAM.
• Stewardship of CI/CD pipelines for efficient software delivery of our Python and React applications.
• Utilising Infrastructure as code via Terraform and Terragrunt.
• Experience managing SQL and NoSQL database infrastructure.
• Expertise in containerisation and orchestration using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Pro-active problem solver and continuous improvement through runbooks, incident reviews, and identifying opportunities to improve developer experience and core infrastructure.

We are flexible and look for the right folks. You are not expected to know everything, but here are some other core technologies and what our environment looks like:

• Event-driven architecture, employing technologies such as NATS, Kafka, gRPC, and Protobuf for event definitions.
• SQL and NoSQL databases: PostgreSQL, Couchbase, DynamoDB.
• Observability platforms: Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus.
• Feature flags to enable us to experiment and control when we release new features to customers.
• Comfortable with scripting languages such as Python, Bash, Go.

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Standardization: Establish consistent environments and processes across the organization to reduce complexity and improve reliability.
• Automation: Implement automation in provisioning, deployment, and scaling to minimise manual intervention and reduce errors.
• Scalability: Design systems that can handle increased loads seamlessly, ensuring performance remains optimal as demand grows.
• Developer Productivity: Provide tools and environments that allow developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure.
• Security and Compliance: Embed security best practices and compliance requirements into the platform to protect data and meet regulatory standards.
• Taking pro-active pragmatic approaches and keeping it simple by solving for problems that we have, not for problems we might encounter.

What it takes:

• Collaborative problem solver who prides themselves on having excellent communication. Pro-actively offers solutions to a problem rather than just communicating a problem.
• Delivery-focused and pragmatic in ensuring customer value is delivered efficiently, with necessary trade-offs considered.
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity, thinking through the problem space, can identify and handle risks involved.
• Growth mindset and curiosity to learn new technologies, approaches, and tooling.
• Seeks out mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and backfill ability for time off.

We are an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Discrimination of any kind based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status is strictly prohibited.