Jobs

Remote work possible 

Company level 5

Salary band £84,000 - £100,000

10% bonus (annual & discretionary & performance based)

Automata is building a world-class company to disrupt the life science industry and empower scientists by making automation a reality for every lab.

The LINQ platform is a comprehensive hardware and software solution that enables our customers to efficiently design and run workflows to streamline everything from routine lab automation tasks to advanced protocols and diagnostics testing

We work with labs across the world to understand their specific workflows and needs and develop personalised solutions that range from diagnostic, and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer at Automata, to play a key technical leadership role in designing, building, maintaining and supporting the infrastructure for the LINQ Cloud Platform and the remote LINQ Workcell platform that runs lab automation workflows

Why is this role important at Automata?

Our mission in the Platform Engineering team is to accelerate our engineering teams by providing automated, reliable, scalable, observable and secure infrastructure. Currently we are evolving the LINQ Cloud and LINQ Workcell platform to provide new global multi-tenant and single-tenant environments for our customers and we are looking for a passionate and driven Staff Platform Engineer to help lead that effort.

You will be responsible for:

• Develop and maintain infrastructure code components to provision and manage multiple multi-tenant & single tenant AWS cloud environments (production and development)

• Develop and maintain infrastructure code to build and deploy Linux and Windows images for the remote LINQ Workcell platform

• Design and develop CI/CD pipelines to build and deploy versioned software components to environments and to accelerate software development processes

• Develop, maintain and administer tools which will automate operational activities and improve engineering productivity

• Develop, maintain and administer observability platforms to provide dashboard log analytics, metrics, traces and alerting for all LINQ Cloud and LINQ Workcell platforms to ensure that we a have clear operational view of all our customer's environments and to meet SLA requirements

• Deploy security tooling in LINQ Cloud and LINQ work cell environments to ensure that we meet security & compliance objectives (ISO27001, SOC2, HIPAA, etc.)

• Manage software platform upgrades and patching on remote LINQ workcell environments Manage core AWS infrastructure, security and user access across multiple AWS accounts

• Create documentation (runbooks, ADRs, diagrams etc.) for LINQ Cloud and LINQ Workcell platform infrastructure to ensure Platform and Software Engineers have a good working knowledge of the architecture

• Continual proactive monitoring and detection of issues in LINQ Cloud and remote LINQ Workcells to ensure continuous service to our customers

• On-call support schedule and incident response for production issues

• Collaborate with software, hardware and data engineering teams to deliver and support customer projects

• Lead root cause analysis of critical business and production issues

• Develop expertise in new technologies and deploy them to production

• Coach and mentor other engineers and champion the platform engineering culture

What it takes:

• Significant and demonstrable experience as a DevOps/platform engineer in production environments

• Strong hands-on experience building AWS architectures using infrastructure as code approaches, in particular with services such as EKS, ECS, Kinesis, MSK, Kafka, etc

• Strong experience using infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, Terragrunt and Packer

• Strong experience running and maintaining container orchestration environments (Docker, Kubernetes) and container deployment approaches (docker-compose, helm, gitops, etc.)

• Strong experience in setting up CI/CD pipelines for containers and other software artefacts in tools such as CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc)

• Strong practical Linux-based systems administration skills, with some image build, and virtualisation experience

• Expertise in programming languages such as Bash, Python, Make, etc. to develop code and tools to automate tasks

• Experience setting up dashboards for observability, monitoring & alerting using tools such as Datadog, Grafana, InfluxDB, etc

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently

• Ability to learn new technical concepts quickly

• Ability to operate in a fast-paced and dynamic environment

• Passion! We are passionate about our mission and we want you to demonstrate that too

• Ownership! We want you to own the work, be accountable and push it through to the finish line

• Expertise! We don’t expect you to know everything, but we would like you to have a superpower in one or more areas

• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to collaborate and rally support

• Self-disciplined, self-managed, self-motivated and strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive

Attributes we’re looking for:

• Strong Communication

• Collaboration

• Accountability

• Takes initiative

• Resilient

Nice to haves:

• AWS IoT Greengrass/MQTT/telemetry experience

• AWS multi-account architecture experience

• Event-driven architecture/Kafka experience

• Data platforms such as Snowflake

• Bare-metal image provisioning experience using PXE netboot or Tinkerbell

What gets us excited?

Automata is transforming the way labs work with open, integrated automation. Our mission is to unlock the potential of labs and the potential of the people who work in them.