Principal Platform & Infrastructure Engineer in Bristol

The role involves building a modern orchestration platform to replace a legacy system of ad-hoc scripts that coordinate long-running, resource-intensive compute jobs across on-premises HPC/HTC infrastructure and cloud environments. The platform must provide engineers with clear visibility into multi-day job pipelines, respond intelligently to failures, and scale compute capacity elastically between on-prem hardware and the cloud during peak demand. This is a foundational, greenfield build.

You will be the senior-most voice on infrastructure, security, and platform architecture, working closely with a software/application engineer who owns the orchestration logic and application-layer design. You'll set the technical direction for how the platform is deployed, secured, and operated — establishing patterns the rest of the team will follow.

You will:

• Own the end-to-end platform architecture: from bare-metal/hypervisor layer through networking, cloud, and orchestration infrastructure.
• Design and implement the on-prem virtualization layer (e.g. Proxmox or equivalent) supporting compute clusters, control-plane services, and developer/test environments.
• Design hybrid cloud architecture (primarily Azure) including compute bursting strategy, cost controls, and workload placement between on-prem and cloud.
• Architect network topology: subnet design, VLAN segmentation, firewall rules, DMZ boundaries, and secure ingress/egress between on-prem HPC/HTC resources, cloud environments, and external services.
• Design and implement identity, authentication, and authorization: RBAC models, service accounts, SSO/federation, least-privilege access policies across platform components.
• Own secrets management strategy (e.g. Vault, Azure Key Vault, or equivalent) and ensure secrets are never hard-coded or leaked into logs/artifacts.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and configuration management (Ansible) to make environment provisioning repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled.
• Define and enforce security baselines: patching cadence, vulnerability scanning, network hardening, audit logging.
• Partner with the application development lead to define clean interfaces between infrastructure concerns (deployment, secrets, networking) and application logic (workflow/task design).
• Act as a technical mentor across the team on infrastructure and security topics.
• Participate in incident response and capacity planning for production workloads.
• Evaluate and make build-vs-buy decisions for infrastructure tooling.

About you:

• Committed to making your customers, stakeholders and colleagues successful, you’re an excellent communicator, listener and collaborator.
• You’re curious, solutions orientated and a world-class problem solver who constantly seeks opportunities to innovate.

You will have:

• Extensive experience in infrastructure/platform engineering, with demonstrable ownership of production systems end-to-end.
• Deep hands-on experience with on-prem virtualization from bare metal (e.g. Proxmox, VMware, or similar hypervisor platforms).
• Strong production experience with Azure (compute, networking, IAM, storage); familiarity with hybrid/multi-cloud patterns.
• Solid networking fundamentals: subnetting, VLANs, routing, firewall design, DMZ architecture, VPN/site-to-site connectivity.
• Practical experience designing and implementing RBAC, authentication/authorization systems (OAuth2/OIDC, SAML, service principals), and secrets management platforms.
• Strong Terraform experience and Ansible (or equivalent configuration management) for provisioning and configuration.
• Comfortable working in Linux-centric environments; strong shell scripting ability.
• Experience securing systems that bridge on-prem and cloud boundaries.
• Understanding of container runtimes (Docker and/or HPC/HTC-oriented alternatives).

You might also have:

• Experience with Kubernetes for cloud-burst or elastic compute scenarios.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Dagster).
• Exposure to high-performance/scientific/technical computing environments.
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK, or equivalent).
• Prior experience in a regulated or IP-sensitive industry where security posture is critical.

Who we are:

Imagination is a UK-based company that creates silicon and software IP designed to give its customers an edge in competitive global technology markets. Its GPU and AI technologies enable outstanding power, performance, and area (PPA), fast time-to-market, and lower total cost of ownership.

Products based on Imagination IP are used by billions of people across the globe in their smartphones, cars, homes, and workplaces. We need your skills to help us continue to deliver technology that will impress the industry and our customers alike.

If you encounter accessibility barriers in the application process or if you have access needs and require support or adjustments to participate equitably in the recruitment process, please email.