IT Lead Engineer in London

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.

The Role As IT Lead Engineer, you'll own the infrastructure that lets our engineers push CPU/GPU-heavy physics simulations without hitting a wall. You'll bring HPC operator experience rather than generalist sysadmin breadth, paired with the calm to fix a boardroom AV fault and the judgment to mentor the engineer who caused it. This is a high-ownership role in a scale-up: you'll be building process as much as running it, and you'll be the person people escalate to when "it's slow" needs a real root cause, not a restart.

What you will do:

• Own and evolve our HPC environment: cluster administration, job scheduling (e.g., Slurm/PBS/LSF), performance tuning, and capacity planning for compute-heavy engineering workloads.
• Experience with Entra ID Governance: Access Reviews, Identity Protection, Privileged Identity Management (PIM) at scale.
• Provide hands-on IT support across the company with an automation-first mindset.
• Mentor and develop junior IT/support engineers, building a culture of ownership and technical rigor rather than ticket-closing.
• Act as an escalation point for complex or high-priority issues across HPC, dev tooling, and general IT support.
• Configure, support and improve developer tooling (e.g. Github Actions/Workflows, JFrog, Chainguard).

What you bring to the table:

• 7–10 years of experience in IT infrastructure, systems administration, or HPC support, with at least 2–3 years in a lead or senior technical role.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience managing HPC infrastructure including cluster administration, job schedulers, and performance tuning for CPU/GPU workloads.
• Experience with compliance frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001) and able to translate control requirements into actual technical implementation (access reviews, logging, encryption, change management), not just pass an audit checklist.
• Strong Linux administration skills, plus comfort supporting a mixed Linux/macOS/Windows environment typical of an engineering org.
• Experience supporting developer tooling and workflows including CI/CD systems, version control, license management, and internal engineering platforms.
• Experience in cloud-native environments across multiple cloud vendors.
• Strong experience designing and setting up zero trust environments.
• Comfort working in a scale-up: fewer guardrails, more ownership, and a need to build process as well as solve problems.
• Strong networking fundamentals and hands-on operational experience: routing and switching, segmentation, firewalls, VPN, enterprise wireless, DNS/DHCP/IPAM and TLS/PKI, with confident packet-level troubleshooting.
• Excellent structured troubleshooting: you can take an ambiguous "it's slow" report, isolate the layer, prove the cause and prevent the recurrence and teach that method to someone else.
• Strong automation and scripting ability (Python, Bash, PowerShell) with infrastructure as code and configuration management as your default way of working.

Nice to Have Skills:

• Strong AV experience: designing and building AV from scratch, not just supporting existing setups.
• Compliance automation platforms (Vanta, Drata).
• Relevant certifications (e.g. CCNA, CCNP, SC-300, MS-102, RHCE, Jamf etc.)
• Experience configuring security tooling and working with security teams.

What we offer:

• Build what actually matters: Help shape an AI-native engineering company at a formative stage, tackling problems that genuinely matter for industry and society.
• Learn alongside exceptional people: Work with a high-caliber, collaborative team of engineers, scientists, and operators who care deeply about doing great work, and about helping each other get better.
• Influence over hierarchy: We operate with a flat structure: good ideas win - wherever they come from.
• Sustainable pace, long-term ambition: Building meaningful technology is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Equity options - share meaningfully in the company you’re helping to build.
• 10% employer pension contribution - because investing in future matters.
• Free office lunches - to keep you energised and focused.
• Enhanced parental leave - 3 months full pay paternity and 6 months full pay maternity leave.
• YellowNest nursery scheme - to help working parents manage childcare costs.
• 25 days of Annual Leave (+ Public Holidays) - because taking time to rest matters.
• Private medical insurance - 100% employee cover, giving you complete peace of mind.
• Wellhub Subscription - gain access to thousands of gyms, classes and wellness apps.
• Eye tests - because good work depends on good health.
• Personal development - dedicated support for learning, development, and leveling up over time.
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - confidential wellbeing support, available whenever you need it.
• Bike2Work scheme and Season ticket loan - to make getting to work easier and greener.
• Octopus EV salary sacrifice - for a simpler, more sustainable way to drive electric.

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.