Senior Platform Engineer Infrastructure Terraform DevOps AWS GCP Hybrid, London

Senior Platform Engineer Infrastructure Terraform DevOps AWS GCP Hybrid, London

Location: United Kingdom, ideally London

Start Date: Immediate

Position Type: Full-time

About the Role

We're seeking a Staff Engineer to own and evolve our technical infrastructure across cloud operations, data systems, internal tooling, and product deployment.

This is a high-impact generalist role perfect for someone who enjoys working across the full stack-from Terraform and containerized environments to production APIs and React frontends-and wants significant ownership of systems that directly enable biochemistry research.

You'll be the technical leader for our infrastructure while driving our enzyme and catalyst discovery and design services toward production readiness for external users. This role requires someone who can architect robust systems, troubleshoot complex distributed environments, and iterate rapidly based on researcher feedback.

What You'll Do

• Build and evolve Horizyn-as-a-service (inference from our main ML model) into a production-ready product for external users, including API enhancements, frontend development, observability, security hardening, and deployment automation
• Design and implement a database system to support all our ML training and data collection effort. The database will integrate structured data from biochemistry databases (KEGG, Rhea, ChEBI, PubChem, UniProt) with unstructured experimental data
• Manage cloud infrastructure through Terraform across our multi-account AWS organization and CI/CD pipelines, and also migrate legacy GCP infrastructure to AWS
• Maintain and improve development environment and containerized deployment options across AWS and local machines
• Serve as on-call technical lead for infrastructure issues and determine how to implement new software tooling that makes researchers' work easier

What We're Looking For

Essential Experience:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated ability to own complex technical systems end-to-end
• Experience with databases (relational and/or NoSQL) and data pipeline design
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS or GCP)
• Frontend development experience with modern frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, or similar) and TypeScript
• Strong Python programming skills and experience building production services
• Hands-on experience with Docker containerization and container orchestration
• Understanding of CI/CD practices, version control workflows, and infrastructure testing
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with LLMs as coding assistants and productivity tools

Highly Preferred

• Database administration experience, particularly PostgreSQL and vector similarity search systems
• Experience with AWS services and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
• Background in scientific computing, ML infrastructure, or building tools for research teams
• Experience with chemical informatics tools, molecular representation formats (SMILES, InChI, SDF, MOL files), as well as ontologies and controlled vocabularies in chemistry/biology (Gene Ontology, ChEBI ontology, EC numbers).

Essential Qualities:

• High Agency: You see infrastructure problems and design solutions without waiting for detailed specifications. You own outcomes and drive projects to completion.
• Systems Thinking: You architect robust, maintainable systems and think holistically about security, cost, performance, and developer experience.
• Generalist Mindset: You're comfortable moving between backend services, frontend interfaces, infrastructure automation, and developer tooling. You learn new technologies quickly.
• Pragmatic: You balance technical excellence with practical constraints, knowing when to refactor and when to ship. You're comfortable working with imperfect legacy systems while building toward better designs.
• Collaborative: You work closely with researchers to understand their needs and translate complex technical concepts into accessible tools and clear documentation.

Why This Role is Different

You won't be siloed into a single area of the stack, or work within rigid corporate constraints to maintain ancient legacy code. You'll inherit a functional but improvable infrastructure that spans development environments, cloud operations, and web services-with the freedom to redesign components that need it.

This role offers unusual breadth and ownership for a startup of our size: you'll lead the technical evolution of Horizyn from internal tool to external product serving customers, design and implement a greenfield database architecture that becomes the foundation for our data platform, shape development practices and infrastructure patterns that scale with the company, and mentor future infrastructure hires as the team grows.

Our small team means your architectural decisions have immediate impact on researcher productivity and product capabilities. If you're energized by the prospect of owning infrastructure end-to-end while building a biochemistry search platform that serves real users, this role is for you.

Senior Platform Engineer Infrastructure Terraform DevOps AWS GCP Hybrid, London