Senior DevOps Engineer

Role:                                      Senior DevOps Engineer

Contract:                                Permanent

Location:                                Greater Oxford Area

Working Pattern:                   Flexible & Hybrid

Salary:                                   Competitive

Security clearance: You must be eligible for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC). We require applicants to hold a UK passport and 5 years of continuous UK residency. We can sponsor clearance for the right candidate, and an active, transferable SC is an advantage; DV is a further advantage. If you are not eligible, we will not be able to progress your application.

A note from the Founders

Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.

We build frontier AI for environments where the cost of a wrong decision is high: defence and national security, critical infrastructure, and commercial organisations making high-stakes decisions on complex data. We are growing fast, and the constraint on how fast is no longer ideas or opportunity. It is whether the systems we ship are good enough for the people who stake decisions on them.

That is where you come in. We need engineers who can build the systems this mission depends on, and build them to a standard that holds when the answer has to be right. You will be trusted to own real systems end-to-end, held to a single high standard, and judged on one thing above all: whether what you ship earns the confidence people place in it when the decision matters.

If you are the kind of engineer who builds rather than assembles, who wants your work measured by whether it holds up in production rather than whether it demos well, and who wants to see the direct line from your work to systems people depend on, we would love to hear from you.

Who We Are

Founded in 2019, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing both digital and physical AI systems built to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments.

At the core of everything we build is AVIS™ (A Very Intelligent System), our orchestration platform: the intelligence layer that fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, so operators can interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. AVIS™ powers our digital decision products, such as ORION for multi-source decision-to-effect, and it powers our physical platforms, including STRIDER for CBRN operations and BARBARIAN for explosive ordnance disposal. The same brain reasons across the screen and the machine.

We work where wrong decisions can be catastrophic. We partner with defence, security and private sector organisations internationally to bring frontier AI into the environments where it matters most, whether that is protecting nations, infrastructure and lives, or transforming how commercial organisations reason over their data and make high-stakes decisions.

Oxford Dynamics is a small team who rely on a collaborative and positive approach and so the right attitude for this role is equally as important as experience. We are at an important stage and time in our growth, and as a Senior DevOps Engineer you will be an essential part of our success

We are looking for a seasoned DevOps professional with deep hands-on expertise in AWS, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD who can also drive cloud-native security. You will design, build and audit scalable infrastructure, automate delivery pipelines and champion cost-efficient, highly available platforms while owning key processes that will help OD remain compliant with our various certifications also

Key Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include, but not limited to:

•     End-to-end cloud ownership – architect, implement and maintain multi-account, multi-region environments using IaC (Terraform, Helm).

•     Platform reliability & automation – manage Kubernetes clusters (EKS/OpenShift), container registries and service meshes; create GitHub Actions / Argo CD pipelines for zero-touch deployments.

•     Security hardening – lead security-posture reviews, implement GuardDuty, CloudWatch and IAM best practices.

•     SRE & monitoring – uphold SLAs through observability stacks, proactive alerting and performance tuning of distributed systems.

•     Collaboration & enablement – automate repetitive tasks, mentor developers and champion DevSecOps best practice across teams.

•     Policy & audit ownership - steward the regular audits we need to put in place to remain compliant with industry standards ensuring provenance.

•     Backup & DR - design AWS Backup plans, run annual restore drills, maintain RPO/RTO dashboards.

•     Capacity & cost optimisation - run the monthly Capacity & Availability Checklist; leverage Compute Optimizer, Savings Plans and Graviton

•     Drift detection - operate Terraform/Helm drift alerts, AMI & container image pipelines with Inspector v2 scanning.

•     Incident & hot-fix response - coordinate emergency changes, rollbacks and post-incident reviews

What you can bring to Oxford Dynamics

A collaborative and supportive attitude to work is essential for this role. You will be expected to operate at multiple levels within the company, with a strong focus on delivery and attention to detail. You will be comfortable working alone, supporting team members as well as interacting with clients if required

Qualifications, experience and skills

•     Proven experience in DevOps / SRE, with recent focus on AWS cloud engineering.

•     Expert in AWS core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, ALB/ELB, CloudFront, ECR/ECS, Control Tower) and security tooling (GuardDuty, IAM Identity Center, CloudWatch.

•     Strong Kubernetes (EKS/OpenShift) administration, Helm packaging and service-mesh know-how.

•     Strong on-prem Kubernetes setup and administration

•     Solid Nexus experience

•     Proficient in IaC (Terraform, Terraform Cloud, CloudFormation), containerisation (Docker, Docker Compose) and Linux systems.

•     Solid CI/CD engineering with GitHub Actions and Argo CD.

•     Experience integrating SAST and DAST best practices.

•     Scripting in Bash and Python or Go for automation

•     Demonstrated success delivering cloud cost-optimisation and high-security solutions for enterprise clients

•     Expertise in implementing SSO across a variety of industry standard software

Preferred / Bonus

•     Experience with MLOps/LLMOps (Softwares such as Sagemaker, Kubeflow or ZenML)

•     Deployment of on-premise Kubernetes

•     Prometheus (or other stacks) observability

•     Experience with AWS Karpenter & Compute Optimizer

•     Compliance literacy - ISO 27001, NIST SSDF/OWASP SAMM, GDPR basics

An active SC or DV clearance is a strong advantage for this role.

Why This Role?

This is a role for engineers who want to build things that matter and see where they land. You will own real systems end-to-end, build and harden the platforms that carry frontier AI into production, and see your work deployed with organisations where getting the answer right matters. Few engineering roles let you say that the thing you built is trusted by people making consequential decisions. If you build to a high bar and want your work to count, we would love to meet you.

Why Oxford Dynamics?

Join one of the most exciting, fastest-growing areas in the world: the convergence of AI and robotics. Every member of the Oxford Dynamics team has a major impact on the products and services we provide. Regardless of job title, you will make a real difference and learn from colleagues across every area of our business.

Benefits include:

•     Genuine scope and a clear path into design leadership

•     Flexible and hybrid working pattern

•     Company pension (NEST) with 4% employer contribution

•     Private healthcare

•     Generous 29 days holiday plus public holidays

Oxford Dynamics is committed to creating an inclusive team experience for all. Regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, or parental status, we believe our work is at its best when everyone feels free to be their authentic self.