Senior Software Engineer - Platform Operations

About us

PhysicsX is a deep-tech company with roots in numerical physics and Formula One, dedicated to accelerating hardware innovation at the speed of software.

We are building an AI-driven simulation software stack for engineering and manufacturing across advanced industries. By enabling high-fidelity, multi-physics simulation through AI inference across the entire engineering lifecycle, PhysicsX unlocks new levels of optimization and automation in design, manufacturing, and operations — empowering engineers to push the boundaries of possibility. Our customers include leading innovators in Aerospace & Defense, Materials, Energy, Semiconductors, and Automotive.

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 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

Equity options – share in our success and growth.
10% employer pension contribution – invest in your future.
Free office lunches – great food to fuel your workdays.
Flexible working – balance your work and life in a way that works for you.
Hybrid setup – enjoy our Shoreditch office while keeping remote flexibility.
Enhanced parental leave – support for life's biggest milestones.
Private healthcare – comprehensive coverage.
Personal development – access to learning and training to help you grow.
Work from anywhere – extend your remote setup to enjoy the sun or reconnect with loved ones.

We value diversity and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech to apply. To help make a change, we sponsor bright women from disadvantaged backgrounds through their university degrees in science and mathematics.

We collect diversity and inclusion data solely for the purpose of monitoring the effectiveness of our equal opportunities policies and ensuring compliance with UK employment and equality legislation. This information is confidential, used only in aggregate form, and will not influence the outcome of your application.