Senior Infrastructure & Data Platform Engineer

We’re an exciting stage in our growth as a digital HealthTech company, with increasing traction across clinical trials and life sciences. Over the past year, we’ve invested significantly in our application and data and infrastructure to support a scalable, reliable, and secure platform for the next phase of growth. We’re now looking for someone to take ownership of that platform, continuing to scale the capabilities and operational maturity in a health tech environment.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Infrastructure and Data Platform Engineer to own and evolve the core infrastructure & data platform, and operational reliability of our health‑tech product. This is a high‑ownership role at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, data systems, DevOps, and operational resilience. You’ll be the person responsible for making sure our platform supports a great DevX experience, is secure, observable, recoverable, and audit‑ready, without slowing teams down. You’ll have significant influence over how the platform is designed and operated.

You’ll work closely with backend engineers, product squads, and leadership to design systems that scale safely, support regulated requirements, and are resilient in real‑world operation. Our tech stack and tooling include GCP, Vercel, GitHub, Bugsnag, Sanity CMS.

You will report to the VP Engineering and will be part of our broader engineering team of about 10. This is a full‑time role, either hybrid (Leeds) or fully remote in the UK. We cannot sponsor visas to work in the UK.

What you’ll do

Infrastructure & Cloud (GCP)

• Own and operate our GCP environment (networking, IAM, compute, storage, managed services)
• Design and maintain infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform)
• Ensure environments are secure, well‑structured, and cost‑aware
• Act as a technical expert on cloud architecture decisions

Data & Platform

• Own and evolve the data technology stack (data stores, pipelines, access patterns)
• Ensure data systems are reliable, observable, and fit for analytics and product use
• Define standards for data integrity, retention, access, and backup

Reliability, DevOps & Observability

• Own CI/CD pipelines and release safety practices
• Design and maintain observability (metrics, logs, tracing, alerts)
• Coordinate incident response, post‑incident reviews, and remediation
• Ensure teams can safely deploy and operate what they build

Security, Risk & Assurance

• Own infrastructure‑level security posture (IAM, secrets, network controls)
• Coordinate and support audits, penetration tests, and risk reviews
• Design and run backup and disaster recovery testing (regular, proven recovery)
• Proactively identify risks and lead mitigation planning

Ways of working

• Produce clear documentation for architecture, runbooks, and operational processes
• Partner with engineers to embed reliability and security into everyday delivery
• Act as an escalation point for complex operational and infrastructure issues

This role is suited to someone who can do the infrastructure technical work as well as manage the infrastructure operationally.

Required

• Strong hands‑on experience running production infrastructure on GCP
• Experience designing and operating data platforms in production
• Deep understanding of cloud security, IAM, and network controls
• Practical experience with incident response, on‑call, and post‑mortems
• Experience planning and executing backup, recovery, and resilience testing
• Experience contributing to audits, managing penetration testing
• Confidence writing and maintaining infrastructure as code
• Confidence managing DevX tools e.g. CI/CD

Desirable

• Experience in health‑tech or regulated domains is a plus, but not required if you bring strong fundamentals.
• Understand how to make a top‑class developer experience that enables high velocity with control.
• Have worked in regulated environments

Behaviours we’re looking for

• A strong sense of ownership: you care about developer experience, reliability, security whilst maintaining a high delivery cadence; you care about responsible data handling.
• Ability to manage multiple workstreams and stakeholders.
• Data‑driven: you use data and evidence to justify your decisions, thinking about now and next.
• Pragmatism: you design guardrails, not bureaucracy.
• Clear communication with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• A mindset of continuous improvement and risk awareness.
• Strong emphasis on clear documentation and runbooks.

Benefits

• Gross salary: £75‑82K per year
• 28 days annual leave per year (plus public holidays)
• £500 annual training budget
• £200 home working budget (one‑off)
• Up to 6% pension match (salary sacrifice)
• EMI share options
• Flexible working with core hours
• Enhanced (family & parental) leave policies

About Little Journey

Little Journey was founded by Dr Chris Evans, a paediatric anaesthetist and researcher who witnessed first‑hand the impact that procedural anxiety, poor preparation, and inconsistent communication can have on patient experience, engagement, and clinical outcomes. Partnering with Sophie Copley, an expert in human‑centred product design, the healthcare platform was developed and demonstrated significant benefits in improving care efficiency, compliance and patient experience. It was rapidly adopted across the NHS supporting children undergoing surgery, before being expanded to support a wide variety of common procedures.

Building on this initial success, Little Journey expanded into clinical trials, applying the same principles of personalised education, emotional support and engagement to research settings. Our Life Science platform, Trial Flow, supports trial participants and their families across therapeutic areas, to alleviate the burdens they face as they navigate participating in a clinical trial. The platform is now a global solution, and we work with major pharmaceutical companies.

Little Journey is a Series A HealthTech start‑up, and we are a highly collaborative, mission‑driven organisation with a team of about 30 (including Product & Tech, Sales & Marketing, Operations & Delivery). We aim to change the future of personalised paediatric care, one empowered family at a time. We value honesty and integrity, trust and accountability, reflection and learning, proactive thinking, and a deep commitment to helping others.

Diversity & Inclusion

We encourage people from all walks of life to apply and strive to eliminate unconscious bias in our recruitment process. We do not discriminate on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran or parental status or disability. We encourage candidates from under‑represented groups to apply. If you need adjustments made to our application process, to help accommodate any disabilities, please let us know at hr@littlejourney.health.

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