Senior Software Engineer - Platform Operations

Senior Platform Engineer – Platform Operations London (Hybrid) | Engineering | Full Time

The Role

As PhysicsX scales, the operational health, cost efficiency and developer experience of our platform become as important as the underlying infrastructure. Our Platform Operations team is responsible for everything that makes the platform observable, governable and pleasant to work with, from the monitoring stack and alerting pipelines through to the developer portal, CI/CD tooling and cloud cost management.

We are looking for a Senior Engineer to join Platform Operations. This is a role for someone with a strong DevOps background who cares deeply about operational excellence, developer experience and the sustainable cost of running infrastructure at scale. You will work closely with Platform SRE, Core Infrastructure and product engineering teams to ensure the platform is always observable, efficient and easy to consume.

What You Will Do

• Own and evolve the platform monitoring and observability stack, including Grafana, Loki, Mimir and associated alerting and dashboarding practices.
• Define and maintain SLO dashboards and alerting policies that give platform and product teams clear visibility into system health.
• Lead the adoption and operation of Backstage as the internal developer portal, building and maintaining plugins, service catalogue entries and golden path templates that improve the developer experience across PhysicsX.
• Drive FinOps practices across the platform, including cloud cost attribution, showback and chargeback reporting, and cost anomaly detection across multi cloud environments.
• Implement and maintain IAM and permissions policies across AWS, GCP, Azure and equivalent cloud providers, ensuring least privilege access is enforced consistently.
• Contribute to lightweight security practices including audit logging, vulnerability scanning integration in CI pipelines and policy enforcement using tools such as OPA or Kyverno.
• Collaborate with Core Infrastructure and Runtime teams to surface operational insights and feed operational learnings back into infrastructure and runtime design.
• Drive incident response practices, including runbook creation, post mortem facilitation and reliability improvement initiatives.
• Contribute automation and tooling in Python or Golang to reduce toil and improve platform operability.

What You Bring to the Table

• DevOps and platform operations background – significant experience in a platform operations, DevOps or SRE role, with a track record of improving reliability, observability and developer experience in a fast moving engineering environment.
• Observability stack expertise – deep familiarity with the Grafana ecosystem, including Loki for log aggregation, Mimir or Prometheus for metrics, and Grafana for dashboarding and alerting. Experience designing observability strategies for distributed systems.
• FinOps and cost observability – practical experience implementing cloud cost attribution and reporting across multi cloud or multi tenant environments, including familiarity with tools such as OpenCost, Kubecost or cloud native cost management consoles.
• Kubernetes knowledge – solid operational familiarity with Kubernetes, sufficient to deploy, debug and manage platform components and understand how infrastructure decisions affect operational outcomes.
• Security awareness – lightweight but genuine experience with security tooling, including policy enforcement (OPA, Kyverno or equivalent), audit logging and vulnerability scanning integrated into delivery pipelines.
• Multi cloud familiarity – experience working across more than one cloud provider, with an appreciation for the differences in IAM, networking and cost models.
• Software engineering capability – you are comfortable writing scripts and tooling to automate operational tasks. Python is the primary language expected; Golang familiarity is a bonus. Interviews will include a coding element.
• Communication and collaboration – you can translate operational data and platform health into clear, actionable insight for engineering teams and leadership.

Ideally

• Experience with Terraform or Crossplane for infrastructure provisioning, even if infrastructure ownership sits with a separate team.
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows using Argo CD, Flux or equivalent tooling.
• Experience with on premises or hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Background in ML platform, simulation or HPC operational environments.
• Kubernetes certifications such as CKAD or CKA are a welcome indication of structured Kubernetes knowledge.
• Exposure to functional programming languages such as Erlang, Elixir or OCaml.

What we offer

Build what actually matters

Help shape an AI-native engineering company at a formative stage, tackling problems that genuinely matter for industry and society. This is work with real-world impact - and something you can be proud to stand behind.

Learn alongside exceptional people

Work with a high-caliber, collaborative team of engineers, scientists, and operators who care deeply about doing great work, and about helping each other get better. We come from diverse backgrounds, but we share a commitment to operating at the highest level and addressing some of the most complex challenges out there. If you’re ambitious, thoughtful, and driven by impact, you’ll feel at home.

Influence over hierarchy

We operate with a flat structure: good ideas win - wherever they come from. Questioning assumptions and challenging the status quo isn’t just welcomed, it’s expected.

Sustainable pace, long-term ambition

Building meaningful technology is a marathon, not a sprint. We believe in balancing focused, ambitious work with a life beyond it. Our hybrid model blends time together in our Shoreditch office with work-from-home days, giving you the flexibility to work sustainably while staying connected in person.

And it doesn’t stop there …

🚀 Equity options - share meaningfully in the company you’re helping to build.

🏦 10% employer pension contribution - because investing in future matters.

🍽️ Free office lunches - to keep you energised and focused.

👶 Enhanced parental leave - 3 months full pay paternity and 6 months full pay maternity leave, to provide extra flexibility during the moments that matter most.

🍼 YellowNest nursery scheme - to help working parents manage childcare costs.

☀️ 25 days of Annual Leave (+ Public Holidays) - because taking time to rest matters.

🏥 Private medical insurance - 100% employee cover, giving you complete peace of mind.

💪 Wellhub Subscription - gain access to thousands of gyms, classes and wellness apps, supporting both physical and mental wellbeing.

👀 Eye tests - because good work depends on good health.

📈 Personal development - dedicated support for learning, development, and leveling up over time.

💛 Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - confidential wellbeing support, available whenever you need it.

🚲 Bike2Work scheme and 🚆 Season ticket loan - to make getting to work easier and greener.

🚗 Octopus EV salary sacrifice - for a simpler, more sustainable way to drive electric.

🔎 Watch this space, we’re continuing to build this as we grow…