Job Specifications
Salary: Competitive depending on experience
Location: 2-3 days on-site at our Harwell office with travel to client site when required
Contract type: Initial 3 month contract with the possibility of permanent and full-time permanent (please let us know your preference when applying) - 37.5 hours
A note from the Founders
Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.
We operate in some of the most complex and high‑stakes environments in the world - defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now, will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.
You will work closely with all the team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day in the work we do.
If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters -we would love to hear from you.
Who We Are
Founded in 2020, Oxford Dynamics (OD) is a fast‑growing UK deep‑tech company developing AI and robotic systems designed to operate in mission‑critical environments.
Our flagship AVIS (A Very Intelligent System) AI framework fuses multi‑modal data - text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds - enabling operators to interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. Our STRIDER robotic platform performs autonomous tasks in hazardous environments, protecting people while extending operational reach.
Our ambition is simple but demanding: to converge AI and robotics so machines can sense, understand and act in complex, real‑world environments.
We work with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives.
What you will be doing here/ why this role matters
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, CloudFormation, 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 & golden images - 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
Requirements
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, Elastic Beanstalk, Control Tower) and security tooling (GuardDuty, IAM Identity Center, CloudWatch)
Strong Kubernetes (EKS/OpenShift) administration, Helm packaging and service-mesh know-how
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 implemen
About the Company
Working at the cutting-edge of 'embodied intelligence' - the convergence of AI & edge computing - Oxford Dynamics vision is to produce intelligent machines able to sense, decide, and act in complex environments. Along this journey, the OD team is producing agentic AI technologies such as AVIS, our enterprise-level modular software platform to process complex multi-modal data using natural language. Founded in 2020 by Shefali Sharma, Dr Edward Jackson and Mike Lawton, Oxford Dynamics brings together a unique blend of battle-h...
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