Whitespace
Senior Cloud Engineer
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Senior Cloud Engineer
Location: Remote / Hybrid (London or Belfast) | UK travel as required
Reports to: Senior Engineering Manager
Clearance: SC Eligible (must be eligible for UK Security Clearance)
Contract Type: Permanent, Full-time
Reference: WS-ENG-SCE-001
About Whitespace
Whitespace builds sovereign AI solutions for highly regulated and complex sectors. Our core product, Collective, is an AI operating system designed for secure, air-gapped, and sensitive environments. We are delivering at pace across high-profile government and commercial programmes and growing rapidly as a Series A-funded company.
The Role
We are looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to own the cloud infrastructure on which a major new data platform will run. This is a foundations role: Google Kubernetes Engine, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and observability, across a deliberately open-source stack that avoids proprietary managed services. There is a genuinely demanding architectural dimension, in that the design spans an edge cluster and a central cluster with replication between them, placing real weight on networking, inter-cluster connectivity and security posture. You will work in a delivery-driven, highly autonomous engineering team, enabling others to ship at pace and with confidence.
What You Will Do
- Design, build and operate secure, resilient cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud for regulated and air-gapped environments.
- Own infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines and automated, repeatable deployments.
- Build and maintain Kubernetes (GKE) clusters and container orchestration, including a split edge and central topology with replication between them.
- Implement observability, monitoring, alerting and incident response across distributed clusters (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki).
- Harden systems and embed security controls to meet regulated-environment and accreditation standards, including network policy, secrets management and identity.
- Own and operate the full open-source stack end to end, rather than consuming managed equivalents.
- Support deployments into restricted, disconnected and high-classification networks.
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Essential Requirements
- Strong experience standing up and running production cloud infrastructure as a Cloud, DevOps or SRE engineer.
- Deep experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible or equivalent).
- CI/CD tooling (e.g. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
- Strong Google Cloud experience, GKE in particular, and strong Linux systems administration.
- Understanding of secure, hardened deployments and network security, with security-conscious instincts suited to an environment subject to accreditation scrutiny.
- SC Clearance held or willingness to undergo.
Strong to Have
- Experience with air-gapped, on-premise or restricted-network deployments, and with multi-cluster or geographically distributed architectures.
- Scripting proficiency (Python, Bash, Go).
- Secrets management, PKI and identity (Vault, Keycloak or equivalent).
- Kubernetes networking and policy tooling (Cilium, eBPF) and event streaming infrastructure (Kafka, ideally via Strimzi).
Desirable
- Experience in defence, government or regulated environments.
- Kubernetes certifications (CKA / CKAD).
- Experience supporting streaming, data or ML platforms at scale.
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What We Offer
- We believe in working hard and playing hard. When we are on, we are fully on, delivering for customers who depend on us. But we also believe that sustainable high performance requires genuine rest and recovery. That is why we have built one of the most generous working patterns in the industry:
- Four-day working weeks in July, August and December. Every Friday off, all month.
- Last Friday of every month off. January through June and September through November, the last Friday is a company day off.
- Early finish every remaining Friday at 3pm. On Fridays where you are working, you finish at 3pm.
- In total, this adds up to approximately 22 additional full days off per year, plus the equivalent of a further 8 days in early finishes. That is roughly 30 days of additional time back on top of your standard annual leave. We trust our people to deliver and in return, we give them the space to recharge properly.
- Competitive salary and benefits package including company pension.
- Opportunity for equity options in a rapidly growing scale-up.
- Access to cutting-edge AI tools and technologies as core working instruments, not side projects.
- A genuine opportunity to shape how a high-growth company operates from the inside.
- The chance to work on technology trusted by the UK's most critical customers.
- A culture that values delivery over process, impact over optics and people over politics.
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