Optibrium
Lead Platform Engineer
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Lead Platform Engineer
Cambridge, UK (remote/hybrid), reporting to CSO
About Optibrium
Optibrium is a technology company developing innovative software and AI solutions for drug discovery. Our solutions enable industry-leading drug research for our worldwide customer base, including many top-10 pharma and innovative biotech companies.
Founded in 2009, Optibrium has its headquarters in Cambridge, UK, with regional offices in Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA, USA.
We are an established business with strong revenues and a positive cash position, having recently secured significant PE investment to expand our business through new innovations, markets and, most importantly, people. Our culture is entrepreneurial — we love fostering ideas from every team member.
The Role
As Lead Platform Engineer, you will lead a small team of Platform Engineers, including near-shore team members, and take ownership of the infrastructure that hosts our internal and customer-facing systems, built on AWS and on-premises solutions. You'll set and drive the technical vision and roadmap for the platform team, while ensuring the platform meets the security and reliability standards expected by our customers and ISO27001.
This is a high-impact role combining management, strategy and hands-on technical work. You'll have the autonomy to drive high-value initiatives, serve as the technical escalation point for the team, and represent the infrastructure and platform aspects of the business to the Security Working Group. Close collaboration across engineering, security and the wider business is essential.
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Main Responsibilities
Leadership and team management
- Manage and mentor a small team of Platform Engineers, including near-shore team members
- Manage sprints, tickets and priorities for the platform team
- Drive the roadmap and develop/maintain the technical vision for the platform team
- Provide guidance and support in customer discussions about deployments, integrations and customisation
- Act as a point of technical escalation, driving architectural discussions and decisions
- Evangelise and embed DevOps best practice across the wider organisation
Platform and infrastructure
- Oversee the architecture of the AWS cloud platform and the on-premises estate, considering failure domains, scalability, flexibility, integrations, stability, redundancy, resiliency and maintainability
- Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for applications; plan and manage releases of the cloud platform
- Plan, manage and contribute to platform feature and improvement projects
- Manage the ongoing costs of the cloud platform
- Maintain platform uptime of 99.99%
Incident response and reliability
- Drive incident response, managing incidents and problems through to resolution
- Engage with customers to remediate issues and help implement feature requests
Security and compliance
- Gatekeep access to platform systems
- Manage ISO27001-related processes, such as audit logging and disaster recovery testing
- Represent the infrastructure and platform at the Security Working Group (SWG)
- Keep on top of public vulnerabilities and manage their remediation
- Report regularly on the security posture and usage of the platform
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Experience and Skills
You will bring:
- Proven experience leading, managing or mentoring a team of Platform or DevOps Engineers
- Strong hands-on expertise with AWS (EKS, EC2, S3, IAM, SSO, VPC)
- Advanced experience with Kubernetes, including application deployment via Helm charts
- Experience developing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
- Proficiency in Python
- Experience building pipelines as code using Jenkins and/or GitHub Actions
- Working knowledge of authentication and authorisation systems such as SSO and OAuth
- Solid understanding of information security risk and process, ideally including ISO27001
- Strong architectural thinking – comfortable weighing up scalability, resiliency, redundancy, maintainability, code quality and security trade-offs
- A systematic, first-principles approach to troubleshooting and incident management
What We're Looking For
Beyond technical skill, we're looking for someone who:
- Has a clear vision for the platform's direction and can bring the team along with it
- Holds strong opinions, loosely held — confident in their judgement but open to challenge and change
- Is adaptable, comfortable switching between planning, troubleshooting and hands-on technical work
- Takes ownership and responsibility for the platform and its outcomes
- Is proactive, always looking to move things forward or rethink an approach when required
- Communicates and collaborates well across engineering, security and the wider business
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