Staff Engineer - Cloud Development New Bristol, UK

At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute.We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack – from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale.As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem.To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world.We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Cloud Development Team and help develop and deploy services. Working closely with our colleagues in Platform Engineering, Datacentre Operations and other engineering teams, you will deploy and operate services on our fleet of cutting-edge AI systems.

As part of our Platform Engineering organisation, you will be involved in the cloud integration, validation, performance benchmarking, optimisation, and operation of our high‑performance AI solutions. These include in‑house AI systems alongside off‑the‑shelf high‑performance servers, switches and storage solutions.

This is a hand‑on role requiring a solid background in use of DevOps tooling, cloud infrastructure, deployment using Infrastructure‑as‑Code, and networking and storage systems. You may have been working in an IT organisation, a datacentre, a cloud provider or as an operator of orchestration or cloud services. You will be in the early years of your career in cloud infrastructure, ready to learn and take direction from Senior Engineers and contribute as an individual.

The Platform Engineering Team at Graphcore

We build Graphcore products into large‑scale AI solutions for our customers and the Cloud Development Team is responsible for providing such systems to both internal users via private clouds and customers via our own public clouds. Often the internal systems will be using and developing pre‑release hardware and software, so it’s vital you are comfortable working with unproven components.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Develop and operate cloud services on our private clouds and support internal users in their use. You will help turn end‑user and product requirements into deployed services.
• Help to build automation to collect and analyse metrics and other data from the cloud services to support clear identification and reporting of any issues. Work with users to provide information of any product‑related issues to Engineering and QA departments.
• Work with our Datacentre Operations Engineers to maintain and operate the fleet of AI systems at peak performance in our private clouds.
• Configure and test new Graphcore AI hardware and systems using Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration, and Infrastructure‑as‑Code in internal and external datacentres.
• Work with external vendors of off‑the‑shelf switches, servers and storage solutions to integrate 3rd party products into our Cloud Reference Design.

Skills and Experience (all required)

• Bachelor\’s degree or equivalent practical experience in a relevant subject.
• Minimum 3 years experience of managing physical or virtual infrastructure, with a proven track record of delivering technical output as an individual contributor.
• Linux scripting ability (bash and python are essential, plus extra tooling e.g. awk, sed, jql).
• Experience Linux system administration (Ubuntu, RHEL and variants).
• Experience with GIT version control system and using it to manage system configuration or automation code.
• Experience with DevOps tools and pipelines such as GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins or similar, ideally as applied to cloud services (private or public).
• A solid hands‑on understanding of the technologies underpinning cloud services (REST APIs, virtualisation of CPUs, storage, systems), virtual networks, block storage, resource management and monitoring.
• Experience with Infrastructure‑As‑Code (IAC) automation tools (e.g. Terraform/OpenTofu, Ansible, Packer).
• Experience working in an AGILE and SCRUM framework, including understanding of priorities, risks, issues, impacts and constraints.
• Experience with container deployment and management tools (e.g. podman, docker, kubernetes).

Desirable but not required

• Experience with solutions for monitoring and observability. e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, Loki, Kafka.
• Experience with managing production Kubernetes clusters and workloads.
• Programming experience with Python3 utilising classes and inheritance.
• Programming experience with Go.

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

Sponsorship

Applicants for this position must hold the right to work in the UK. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or support for visa applications.

We take pride in our commitment to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of our recruitment process, we ask for confidential diversity data from all applicants. This data will be anonymised so that no personal identification information will be collected, and is retained for statistical purposes only and is not attached to your application. Your responses to the following three questions will remain confidential and will not impact or be used in any way in regards to your application. We are only using this data to improve our hiring process to be inclusive of all diversity backgrounds.