Lead Platform Engineer, Foundation Partners
AI Early Stage Startup
£127.5-150k
2-3 days a week in office (Central London )
People strategy & operations consulting
Open for applications
People strategy & operations consulting
1-20 employees
Open for applications
£127.5-150k
2-3 days a week in office (Central London )
1-20 employees
Company mission
To align clients' people strategy with their business strategy to help them achieve their mission.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate will have come from a FAANG, Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir type organisation, or from an exceptional startup environment with a very high engineering culture, where they have personally owned and built the DevOps function while remaining hands on
- This isn't someone who managed a team that did the work. It's someone who did the work themselves at a high standard, and knows what world class infrastructure looks like because they've built it before
- At least 7 years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure
- You've owned production systems rather than only contributing to them, including multi-tenant or customer-specific environments, and you understand the complexity that comes with them
- Deep fluency with Kubernetes, a major cloud (AWS preferred), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code, plus the judgment to know when not to add another layer
- You come from somewhere that held a high bar, and you expect engineering excellence from yourself and the systems around you
- You're hands-on and have no interest in a purely architectural role. You explain complex tradeoffs simply and don't over-engineer
- You treat speed, security, cost, and reliability as constraints that all apply at once, and you've struck that balance before
- Bonus: you've operated under formal security or compliance regimes (SOC2, HIPAA, or similar) and know how to make controls a strength rather than a tax
What the job involves
- Lead DevOps Engineer in AI startup: own end-to-end, multi-tenant infra from GitOps to compliance in a hands-on, fast-paced role that shapes trusted, scalable AI platforms
- Own secure, multi-tenant infrastructure end-to-end, from GitOps to compliance controls, in a hands-on, fast-paced role shaping one of the most ambitious applications of AI today
- The founding team includes operators who spent years deploying production AI inside some of the world's most demanding enterprise environments
- They know what it takes to make ambitious technology hold up under real pressure, and they're now applying that standard to a domain that's ripe for transformation
- This is early enough that what you build becomes the foundation everything else stands on, and senior enough that you'll be working alongside people who've done this at the highest level before
- The systems being built run inside security-conscious, compliance-bound enterprises, where the infrastructure underneath has to be as trustworthy as the intelligence layered on top of it
- The company now needs a Lead Platform Engineer to own that infrastructure end to end
- They're a team of 15 across the whole company so this isn't a role where you sit in a queue of tickets
- You'll be the single, clear owner of how the company deploys, operates, secures, and scales, across its own platform and across isolated customer environments where the bar for trust is absolute
- It's a huge amount of responsibility and autonomy, which is exactly the appeal
- The GitOps deployment backbone on Argo CD, so a small team can ship continuously and safely across many clusters
- Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) across the fleet of production environments
- Infrastructure-as-code in Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt, the source of truth for everything the company runs
- Multi-tenant, per-customer isolation: standing up a fully isolated, compliant environment for each customer, with its own cluster and data plane, and deploying to it with confidence. This is the hardest and most important part of the job
- Security and compliance posture: secrets management, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and the audit-grade controls customers will hold you to
- Observability: telemetry, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting that keep a complex distributed system legible
- Reliability, incident response, and the operational runbooks that protect customer trust
- CI/CD and release automation that keep the shipping cadence high
- Developer experience: making it fast and painless for engineers to deploy and debug
- This is a high-intensity, high-stakes role. The team moves quickly and gives direct feedback, the responsibility you carry will likely outrun your title, and you'll go wherever the work needs you most, which sometimes means unglamorous tasks that matter more than anything else that week
- The people who thrive here find that kind of ownership and growth exciting, and they weren't looking for a nine-to-five
Application process
- We usually respond within three days
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Foundation Partners offers consulting to help businesses build strong people, culture and HR operations. It offers three service packages ranging from advice and guidance to the embedding of a fractional people team.
With a view that thriving people build thriving businesses, Foundation Partners provides companies with the experience and support to empower their people towards creating business success. It does so both on a strategic level as well as the day-to-day, making sure that companies can build for the future while ensuring their teams have what they need today.
With a wealth of experience within the company, Foundation Partners is a stand-out potential partner for any business that wants to build a better people function. Some of the clients the company has worked with include Vinted, Monzo, JustGiving, Accenture and Checkout.com.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- 25 day's holiday
Company HQ
Fitzrovia, London, UK
Leadership
Anouk Agussol
(Managing Partner)Director at the Amplified People Group and JBM, as well as Founder / CEO at Unleashed.Company. They are also a Fellow at Foundervine and have extensive experience in People Strategy and Culture.
Andy Meikle
(Managing Partner)Director at the Amplified People Group, JBM and Unleashed. Is an Investor / Advisor for The Octopus Club and has extensive experience in People and Operations.
Andrew Richardson
(Managing Partner)Director at the Amplified People Group, JBM and Unleashed. Is an Advisor at Abingdon Software Group and Antler and has extensive experience in People and Operations.
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