Team Lead, Platform Engineering

Uncover; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Retirement contributions

Health benefits

Vacation days

Job summary

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for AI workloads. Our platform is Kubernetes-native and spans regions, delivering VMs, storage, and networking through a fully automated stack.

You will lead a platform engineering team, set technical direction, translate product requirements into work, and ensure reliability and security across services. Join a global team; you will stay hands-on, drive architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and collaborate across time zones to

Qualifications

• 5+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering, with at least 2 years leading an engineering team.
• Strong backend or systems programming background in a production environment (Python/Go/Rust; other languages welcome).
• Kubernetes at depth: cluster operations, CNI networking, scheduling, workload management.
• GPU infrastructure experience: provisioning, resource allocation, platform/API surface.
• Solid networking fundamentals: L2/L3, VLANs, overlay networks, multi-tenant isolation.
• Service architecture: designing/operating production-grade control-plane services and APIs.
• Security awareness: trust boundaries, least privilege, secure defaults.
• Proven people management: running 1:1s, performance feedback, accountability for team delivery.
• Clear communicator who translates technical complexity for product/leadership stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead a platform engineering team: technical direction, design reviews, code reviews, day-to-day delivery.
• Set technical direction for your team's stack; translate product requirements into scoped work.
• Represent platform engineering in roadmap planning and sequence technical work accordingly.
• Surface operational pain points with bring-up teams and turn them into scalable features.
• Collaborate with security engineering to integrate guidance and remediate findings.
• Coordinate with other platform leads on architecture and cross-team delivery.
• Own reliability, observability, security, and interface/versioning standards for services.
• Stay hands-on with high-risk engineering work alongside the team.
• Run post-mortems and close structural gaps after incidents, not just the issue.
• Manage the team: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring interviews, onboarding.

Skills

Platform engineering leadership

Backend or systems programming

Python

Go

Rust

Kubernetes

GPU infrastructure

Networking fundamentals

Service architecture

Security awareness

People management

Clear communicator

Job description

About VoltaVolta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

About The Role

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for AI workloads. Our platform is Kubernetes-native, spans multiple regions, and delivers virtual machines, storage, and networking through a fully automated infrastructure stack. Platform Engineering is organized as capability teams, each owning a defined part of the stack: compute, storage, the control plane and API layer, confidential computing, networking, and the customer-facing surface. You will lead one of them.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead a platform engineering team: technical direction, design reviews, code review, and day-to-day delivery.
• Set the technical direction for your team's area of the stack, and design and build the platform layers it owns as product requirements take shape.
• Represent platform engineering in roadmap planning: translate product requirements into scoped, sequenced technical work, communicate trade-offs, and keep delivery on track.
• Work closely with the bring-up teams to surface operational pain points and turn them into scalable platform features.
• Collaborate with the security engineering team to integrate security guidance at the platform layer and ensure findings are remediated effectively.
• Coordinate with the other platform engineering leads on shared architecture, joint initiatives, and cross-team and cross-timezone delivery.
• Own reliability, observability, security, and interface and versioning standards for the services your team ships.
• Stay hands-on: take on complex or high-risk engineering work directly alongside the team.
• Run post-mortems and close structural gaps after incidents, not just the immediate issue.
• Manage the team: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring interviews, and onboarding.

What You Bring

• 5+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering, with at least 2 years leading an engineering team.
• Strong backend or systems programming background in a production environment. Our working languages are Python, Go, and Rust; we welcome strong engineers from other compiled or object-oriented languages (for example C++, C#, or Java) who are ready to work across our stack as it evolves.
• Kubernetes at depth: cluster operations, CNI networking, scheduling, and workload management in production.
• GPU infrastructure experience: provisioning, resource allocation, and surfacing capacity through a platform or API layer.
• Solid networking fundamentals: L2/L3, VLANs, overlay networks, and multi-tenant isolation in cloud environments.
• Service architecture skills: designing, operating, and versioning production-grade control-plane services and APIs across IaaS and above, holding the team to clean, industry-standard interface and breaking-change practices.
• Security awareness: trust boundaries, least privilege, and secure defaults when building platform services.
• Proven people management: running 1:1s, delivering performance feedback, and taking accountability for a team's delivery and wellbeing.
• Clear communicator who can translate technical complexity for product and leadership stakeholders.

Nice to Have (But Not Essential)

None of these are required. Several map to specific teams, so strength in one or more helps us match you to the right one:

• Fluency with AI-assisted development, and interest in scaling agent-assisted workflows across the team (agentic CLI tools, MCP, skills, APIs) to amplify delivery.
• Familiarity with confidential computing technologies: TEEs, AMD SEV, Intel TDX, or Confidential Containers (CoCo).
• Experience building SaaS or PaaS layers on top of an IaaS platform.
• Familiarity with RDMA, InfiniBand, or RoCE networking in GPU or HPC clusters.
• Experience working distributed across time zones with counterparts in other regions.
• Exposure to serverless or inference serving infrastructure.

What We Offer

At Volta, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted and able to grow. We're building a company where you can make an impact, keep a healthy balance between work and life, and build a career you're proud of. As a global team, we do our best to provide great benefits wherever you're based. While some benefits vary by country due to local regulations, we believe looking after our people is simply the right thing to do.

• Competitive salary based on the work you do here, not your previous salary.
• Equity in Volta, giving you the opportunity to share in the company's long-term success
• Retirement/pension contributions
• Comprehensive health, wellbeing and insurance benefits
• Generous number of vacation days each year

Equal Opportunity

Volta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.

Accessibility

Volta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at [e-mail]. We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.

Candidate Privacy Notice

By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.