Principal Cloud Engineer

At Gigaton, we’re on a mission to cut gigatonnes of carbon emissions from the world’s biggest emitting industries (like cement, steel and glass), by building autonomous AI control and optimisation systems that learn and leverage the physics of manufacturing. Our products run heavy industrial plants more efficiently, more stably, and with lower emissions in real time - laying the foundation for the next industrial revolution. We are a team of scientists, engineers, builders, and operators who love hard problems, have high standards, and want to make change happen in the physical world. We care about deep tech, but we care even more about whether it delivers cost and carbon impact in a live plant, with real people, under real constraints. With Gigaton, you’ll solve really tough problems in places few people ever get close to, and build something that actually helps the planet. Are you up for the challenge?

We’re looking for a Principal Cloud Engineer to join our platform team and help us push the boundaries of what AI can do for the planet. We don’t draw a specific line between engineering and research teams. We operate as one cohesive unit, sharing tech stack, knowledge, and objectives. Our focus spans from fundamental ML research to commercial-grade software development, offering diverse learning and impact opportunities.

Your impact

• Secure, repeatable deployments across enterprise cloud environments.
• Increasingly, Gigaton deploy cloud workloads across GCP, AWS, and Azure, so that we can deploy ML-Ops and data solutions inside our customer’s perimeter.
• You will help to design, simplify, and improve our entire stack so that we can meet stringent cybersecurity guidelines, while remaining agile.
• Set the technical bar, and lift up your team mates. As the most senior practitioner in the team, you will be a role model and mentor.
• You will help your team mates through review, pair programming, and architectural oversight, so that every engineer becomes better for working alongside you.
• A clear architectural roadmap for cloud and DevEx.
• Gigaton have ambitious goals, and we need to move quickly. You will be entrusted with the architectural decisions that help our entire engineering organisation ship at speed.
• You will lead through collaborative work and design documents, to build consensus and plan the work that unblocks and supports our engineers.

Your main responsibilities

• Own key platform components across AWS and GCP, shaping architecture for scalable, secure systems.
• Deploy and operate our workloads inside customer-owned cloud accounts, working directly with their IT and infrastructure teams to navigate requirements and constraints.
• Assist more junior team members with their development, helping them learn core software engineering skills and best practices.
• Propose and drive improvements to existing systems and pipelines.

What a great fit looks like

• You have deep experience with AWS or GCP (bonus points for both!).
• You have a solid understanding of cloud networking.
• You’re fluent in Python and Terraform.
• You have designed or owned CI/CD pipelines for frequent, safe releases.
• You love to collaborate with others and are familiar with agile technical practices, including pair programming, mobbing and TDD.
• You balance good engineering practices with pragmatism: you know when “good enough now” beats “perfect later”.
• We’re a startup! You are comfortable with ambiguity and enjoy owning a problem from discovery to delivery.

Bonus points

• You’ve worked in industrial, IoT, or similarly complex environments.

The ways we like to work

• We are a collaborative team. We regularly and eagerly pair and work through problems together.
• We love bouncing ideas off each other!
• We have regular retrospectives to keep getting better as a team.
• No-blame culture: we support each other when things go wrong and always run post-mortems so we never make the same mistake twice.
• You’ll get a badge for causing your first production incident.
• We ship fast. We are proud of our CI/CD pipeline and quality gates, and we review our teammates' work quickly.
• Our small team regularly deploys over a dozen times a day. Yes, we ship on Fridays.
• We are hooked on observability: we strive to get visibility over all parts of our system to make incident response as painless as possible and to know what needs to improve.

In return for your hard work, we’ll give you

• Equity in the company: When we win, you win. You’ll get share options, so you’re part of our journey from the inside.
• Flexible working: We trust you to know how and when you work best and to work that out with your team.
• 30 days of holiday (plus bank holidays). Rest is productive. Take the time you need to recharge.
• A generous pension scheme. We’re planning for the future in more ways than one.

Our Operating Principles

• Go Gig or Go Home
• High Bar, All In. What we do matters to humanity, to our customers and to each other. We hold ourselves to an extraordinarily high bar and bring the urgency this mission requires.
• Concrete Honesty: Be honest. As concrete forms the foundation of our world, genuine honesty and transparency are the bedrock of our culture.
• Autonomous Ownership: High agency, high ownership. We build systems that take control and make things better. We do the same: see it, own it, drive it.
• Cement it with Kindness & Fun: Have fun, be kind. We’re here to extend Earth's life, but ours is still limited. We want to enjoy the ride.