Lead DevOps Engineer

We're partnering with a well-funded, fast-growing AI company that is building the core platform behind modern drug discovery. Their technology brings together scientific evidence, reasoning, and decision-making across the full drug development lifecycle, with the goal of getting new treatments to patients faster.

The founding team comes from one of the world's leading enterprise AI and data companies, where they spent years deploying production systems in some of the most demanding environments there are. They're now applying that experience to pharma, and they're looking for engineers who have worked to the same standard.

Bringing a single drug to market can take over a decade and cost billions. Our client's platform is designed to shorten that timeline, and it runs inside highly regulated, security-conscious enterprises where the underlying infrastructure has to be as trustworthy as the science it supports.

They're hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own that infrastructure end to end. You'll be the clear owner of how the company deploys, operates, secures, and scales, across both its core platform and the isolated environments it runs for each customer. It's a role with significant responsibility and real scope to shape how things are built.

What you'll own

• A GitOps deployment backbone built on Argo CD, enabling a small team to ship continuously and safely across many clusters

• Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) across multiple production environments

• Infrastructure-as-code in Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt as the single source of truth

• Multi-tenant, per-customer isolation: standing up fully isolated, compliant environments for each pharma customer, each with its own cluster and data plane, and deploying to them with confidence. This is the most challenging and most important part of the role.

• Security and compliance: secrets management, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and SOC2-level (and beyond) controls that enterprise customers will audit

• Observability: telemetry, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting across a complex distributed system

• Reliability, incident response, and operational runbooks

• CI/CD and release automation that support a fast shipping cadence

• Developer experience, making it quick and straightforward for engineers to deploy and debug

What our client is looking for

• 6+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure

• Experience owning production systems rather than only contributing to them, ideally including multi-tenant or customer-specific environments

• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, a major cloud provider (AWS preferred), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code, along with the judgement to know when not to add complexity

• A background in high-performing engineering environments and high personal standards

• A hands-on approach. This isn't a purely architectural role. You can explain complex tradeoffs clearly and you avoid over-engineering.

• The ability to balance speed, security, cost, and reliability at the same time, with a track record of doing so

• Bonus: experience working under formal security or compliance frameworks (SOC2, HIPAA, GxP, or similar), and an approach that treats controls as a strength rather than a burden

Is this right for you?

This is a high-intensity, high-impact role in a fast-moving team that values direct feedback. Your responsibilities will likely grow beyond your title, and you'll step in wherever you're needed most, including the less glamorous work that sometimes matters most. It suits someone who's energised by ownership and rapid growth rather than looking for a nine-to-five.

Location: EU or UK (Remote) if outside London (Soho)- 2 days a week if within 1 hr commute to London
Salary: £110,000 - £130,000 + equity + private medical