Principal Infrastructure Engineer

📍 Bristol (hybrid – 3 days onsite)

✅ Eligible for DV Clearance (10+ years in the UK)

The headline

If you’re an infrastructure leader who still loves building, you want to define how platforms are engineered in a company that genuinely values technical excellence and you want to help shape and build capability across a scaling team, let’s talk.

This is a technical authority position where you’ll shape platforms, set engineering standards, and design systems that are used in real-world, mission-critical environments.

The infrastructure that underpins everything built here needs to be resilient, secure, and deployable into some of the most challenging operational contexts out there.

You’ll be the person teams look to when the problem is ambiguous, the stakes are high, and the architecture matters.

Why is this role interesting?

• You’ll own infrastructure architecture across a growing portfolio of products and programmes
• You’ll influence how engineering is done: tooling, patterns, standards and delivery approach
• You’ll stay hands-on: designing, building and deploying real systems
• Your work will support deployed users and critical internal capabilities
• You’ll operate in a high-trust environment where technical decisions are made by engineers

If you like solving hard problems properly, with a team of brilliant engineers, this is for you.

What you’ll be doing

• Acting as the senior technical authority for infrastructure design and strategy
• Making architectural decisions across cloud, on-prem, networking, virtualisation and HCI
• Designing for security, resilience, performance and high availability
• Breaking complex systems into deliverable technical workstreams
• Building and deploying infrastructure (IaC-first)
• Setting best-practice patterns for other engineers to follow
• Owning monitoring, logging and operational insight
• Shaping DevOps and Agile ways of working
• Mentoring strong engineers and levelling up the wider function
• Resource Management - ensuring bids are costed and the team have capability to deliver what's being promised

What you’ll bring

• Deep experience across Linux, networking, cloud and virtualisation
• Strong IaC and automation (Terraform / Ansible / Python / Bash or similar)
• A track record of technical leadership in complex environments
• The ability to make and communicate architectural trade-offs
• Experience delivering high-availability / fault-tolerant systems

Bonus points for:

• Software-defined networking / SD-WAN
• Far-edge or constrained environments
• Regulated sectors (defence, national security, telco, FS, automotive)
• Secure cloud application platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP)

Clearance

You must be eligible for UK Security Clearance (SC).

DV is a significant advantage.

The environment

• Hybrid: 3 days per week in Bristol / client site
• High-trust, low-bureaucracy engineering culture
• Flexible working supported
• Real investment in your technical growth