DevOps Engineer

About Arondite: Arondite is a defence technology company building the foundational software and AI to power the autonomous age. Our aim is to revolutionise the way organisations collaborate with sensors, robots and autonomous systems and use the data they generate. We are driven by our determination to help defend our collective democratic values and by our strong belief that an elite group of engineers can make a big difference. We are ambitious, well-funded and building for the long-term.

You will join Arondite at a pivotal moment in the company’s journey. Our company is being built by exceptional engineers - people who find high-impact and technically challenging work engaging and exciting, and who consistently deliver outsized impact. You will collaborate with other brilliant minds to solve some of the world’s hardest and most important problems.

You will have ownership and autonomy from Day One. There is no corporate ladder at Arondite. From your first day, you will directly influence the design, functionality, and direction of Arondite’s product offering. We hire the best people and give them extremely high levels of autonomy; the sky is the limit for an individual with the right ambition.

If you are motivated by our mission and if you want to be part of a growing team of outstanding people, then we want to hear from you.

This is a high-impact role centered on Platform Engineering and Developer Experience (DevEx). You will take full ownership of our internal development ecosystem, evolving it into a robust, self-service platform that abstracts infrastructure complexity. Your goal is to design and maintain the "Golden Path": the standardized, automated route from local code to a production-ready state. You are a versatile engineer who views infrastructure as a product and internal developers as your primary customers.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Platform Product Management: Take end-to-end ownership of the internal developer platform, identifying bottlenecks in the software delivery lifecycle and building automated solutions to resolve them.
• Golden Path Engineering: Architect and evolve standardized deployment patterns that bake in security, compliance, and observability, allowing product teams to focus strictly on business logic.
• Tooling Infrastructure: Manage the lifecycle of our self-hosted engineering suite (e.g., GitLab), ensuring high availability, performance, and seamless integration with the wider ecosystem.
• Continuous Delivery Evolution: Drive the adoption of modern deployment methodologies (such as GitOps) to ensure declarative, reproducible, and audited state management across all environments.
• Building secure, robust software by adhering to secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP) and internal security policies throughout the development lifecycle.

You should have:

• Platform Ownership: 3+ years of experience building or scaling internal developer platforms or sophisticated CI/CD ecosystems.
• Architectural Versatility: Deep understanding of cloud-native primitives (Compute, Networking, Storage) and the ability to implement them across different providers or hybrid environments.
• Orchestration Expertise: Proven ability to manage container orchestration at scale, focusing on abstracting complexity for end-users rather than just "managing clusters."
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Expert-level proficiency in declarative configuration management and modular code design (e.g., Terraform, OpenTofu, or Pulumi).
• Automation Mindset: Strong competency in scripting or systems programming (Python, Go, or Bash) to glue disparate systems into a unified platform.

Ideally, you would also have:

• Self-Hosted Infrastructure Management: Experience maintaining and scaling critical engineering tools (e.g., GitLab, Artifactory, or SonarQube) at the enterprise level, including backup/restore and high-availability strategies.
• Evolutionary Architecture: Proven experience migrating workloads between platforms (e.g., EC2 to EKS, or cross-cloud) with a focus on data integrity and minimal downtime.
• Observability as a Service: Ability to implement standardized telemetry pipelines (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or ELK) that provide developers with out-of-the-box visibility into their services.
• Platform Security (DevSecOps): Familiarity with automated policy enforcement and compliance-as-code (e.g., OPA, Kyverno, or AWS Config) to maintain CyberEssentials+/ISO standards without manual intervention.
• Software Engineering Fundamentals: Proficiency in a high-level language (Go, Python, or Rust) to build custom controllers, CLI tools, or API shims that enhance the platform’s capabilities.
• FinOps & Resource Efficiency: Experience implementing automated cost-attribution and rightsizing logic to ensure the platform remains economically sustainable as it scales.
• Knowledge of service mesh architectures: Istio or Linkerd, for traffic management and mTLS.
• Experience with classified networks: Experience with Official Sensitive and/or Sensitive networks.

Note: We want Arondite to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We don't expect everyone to have experience across each of these areas. Please apply even if you only partially fulfil this list.

Right to Work: We require that all candidates have an existing Right to Work in the UK at the time of application.

Security clearance: We believe in working closely with defence customers. As a result, this role will require the individual to hold a clearance or be willing to undergo UK security vetting to Security Check (SC) or above. This normally requires having continuous residency in the UK for at least 5 years.

Office vs Hybrid working: We are focused on building a positive, collaborative engineering-driven culture. We therefore believe in making the office a friendly, comfortable and fun place to be, and we try to work from the office where possible. Of course, there are times when it makes sense for you to work from home and that's OK. You may also need to travel to visit customers, depending on your role. But in general you should only apply to join Arondite if you're excited to come into the office and work in person by default.

Application process: Generally, our interview process is comprised of the following stages:

• CV submission with initial questions
• Introductory Teams call (30-45 mins)
• In-person technical interview (1-2 hours)
• Final interview with one of Arondite’s Founders (30 mins)

Highly competitive base salary, generous equity in EMI share options in a well-funded and growing startup, 7% employer pension contribution, free breakfast and lunch every day; free pizza and beers weekly, private health and dental insurance, cycle to work scheme, relocation support, access to any resources, equipment and training that you need to do your job in a world-class way, and the opportunity to work with and learn from exceptional colleagues with excellent academic experience and deep industry knowledge.