Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Key areas of responsibility

• Owning and assuring infrastructure architecture and design, ensuring privacy, security, compliance, high availability, performance, and resilience across all infrastructure capabilities, including cloud environments, applications, and security and service platforms.
• Scoping and shaping complex infrastructure initiatives, providing technical leadership during context alignment, architectural decision-making, and execution to deliver solutions that meet demanding operational and regulatory requirements.
• Acting as a key technical decision-maker, balancing trade-offs, managing risk, and ensuring long-term maintainability and platform health across interconnected systems.
• Designing, developing, and deploying infrastructure components such as networks, virtual machines, containers, and orchestration workflows, acting as a hands-on technical leader and setting best-practice patterns for others to follow.
• Producing high-quality system diagrams, documentation, and design artefacts, maintaining high standards of accuracy, clarity, and diligence.
• Maintaining and optimising infrastructure platforms, including configuration management, system upgrades, and the implementation of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices to ensure consistency and scalability.
• Implementing and evolving monitoring, logging, and alerting capabilities to provide real-time system insight, enable proactive issue detection, and optimise uptime.
• Developing and standardising secure build processes for end-user devices, ensuring consistent integration with public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, supported by clear documentation and reusable workflows.
• Championing modern Agile and DevOps practices, influencing ways of working across teams, improving feedback loops, and raising the quality and predictability of infrastructure delivery.
• Mentoring and coaching engineers across the organisation, providing technical guidance, review, and example to support professional growth and improve overall engineering capability.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

• A degree or equivalent experience in computer science, IT, or a related discipline.
• Proven ability to provide technical leadership and influence engineering direction, operating autonomously in complex and ambiguous environments.
• Extensive experience as an infrastructure engineer, with strong understanding of networking, operating systems, cloud platforms, and virtualisation technologies.
• Experience with scripting and automation (e.g. Python, Bash) and tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or similar, with a strong preference for infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Demonstrated experience adopting and promoting Agile and DevOps practices to improve collaboration, delivery quality, and operational outcomes.
• Strong ability to decompose complex systems into clear technical workstreams, enabling engineers at all levels to contribute effectively.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to a range of stakeholders.

• Experience delivering complex, connected systems in regulated sectors such as defence, national security, telecommunications, financial services, or automotive
• Designing, deploying, and supporting solutions at the far-edge in denied, disrupted, intermittent, or lossy communication environments.
• Building and maintaining secure application deployments on AWS, Azure, or GCloud.
• Background experience in IT support or operational environments.

• Problem-solver: Able to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues pragmatically and efficiently.
• Systems thinker: Comfortable reasoning about large-scale, interconnected systems and balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Detail-oriented: Maintains high standards and adherence to best practices.
• Adaptable and self-motivated: Learns quickly and continuously develops technical capability.
• Technical mentor: Develops engineers through guidance, review, and example rather than formal management.
• Collaborative: Works effectively across disciplines, sharing knowledge openly.
• Continuous improvement mindset: Proactively identifies opportunities to improve systems, processes, and ways of working.
• Agile mindset: Applies Agile principles pragmatically, facilitating alignment, prioritisation, and collaboration.

Working at Rowden