Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Department: Engineering
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Bristol, UK
We’re building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.
Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 160 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe’s fastest-growing engineering businesses.
Technical Leadership in Infrastructure & Applications
As part of this journey, we are scaling our Infrastructure & Applications capability. This function builds intelligent, resilient, and private solutions from the cloud to the far-edge, ensuring robust and secure operations for our clients.
As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you will act as a senior technical authority across Rowden’s portfolio of projects, products, tools, and systems - including those relied upon by hundreds of deployed users and critical internal capabilities. You will collaborate closely with engineers, delivery teams, and customers, tackling complex technology challenges in demanding environments.
This role is hands‑on, fast‑paced, and impact‑driven. You will provide technical leadership through architectural decision‑making, system design, and deep engineering expertise, guiding teams through uncertainty and enabling the delivery of robust, mission‑focused solutions. For the right person, this is an exceptional opportunity to shape infrastructure platforms and engineering standards in a growing, high‑trust organisation.
You will bring broad, applicable knowledge across domains including workload virtualisation, cloud infrastructure, Linux operating systems, advanced networking concepts, and hyper‑converged infrastructure (HCI). Experience with high‑availability systems, fault‑tolerant architectures, and software‑defined networking (e.g. SD‑WAN) is highly valuable. Strong troubleshooting skills, clear communication with technical and non‑technical stakeholders, and the ability to decompose complex systems into manageable technical workstreams are essential.
While this role offers hybrid working options, it requires a minimum of 3 days per week on‑site at our Bristol HQ, with occasional travel to customer sites. Candidates must be willing to obtain UK National Security Vetting clearance, with SC required and DV desirable.
More information about security clearance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels
Key areas of responsibility
As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Rowden, you will be responsible for:
- Owning and assuring infrastructure architecture and design, ensuring privacy, security, compliance, high availability, performance, and resilience across all infrastructure capabilities, including cloud environments, applications, and security and service platforms.
- Scoping and shaping complex infrastructure initiatives, providing technical leadership during context alignment, architectural decision‑making, and execution to deliver solutions that meet demanding operational and regulatory requirements.
- Acting as a key technical decision‑maker, balancing trade‑offs, managing risk, and ensuring long‑term maintainability and platform health across interconnected systems.
- Designing, developing, and deploying infrastructure components such as networks, virtual machines, containers, and orchestration workflows, acting as a hands‑on technical leader and setting best‑practice patterns for others to follow.
- Producing high‑quality system diagrams, documentation, and design artefacts, maintaining high standards of accuracy, clarity, and diligence.
- Maintaining and optimising infrastructure platforms, including configuration management, system upgrades, and the implementation of infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) practices to ensure consistency and scalability.
- Implementing and evolving monitoring, logging, and alerting capabilities to provide real‑time system insight, enable proactive issue detection, and optimise uptime.
- Developing and standardising secure build processes for end‑user devices, ensuring consistent integration with public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, supported by clear documentation and reusable workflows.
- Championing modern Agile and DevOps practices, influencing ways of working across teams, improving feedback loops, and raising the quality and predictability of infrastructure delivery.
- Mentoring and coaching engineers across the organisation, providing technical guidance, review, and example to support professional growth and improve overall engineering capability.
Key skills, experience and behaviours
We are looking for someone passionate about technology who actively invests in their technical skills and abilities alongside:
- A degree or equivalent experience in computer science, IT, or a related discipline.
- Proven ability to provide technical leadership and influence engineering direction, operating autonomously in complex and ambiguous environments.
- Extensive experience as an infrastructure engineer, with strong understanding of networking, operating systems, cloud platforms, and virtualisation technologies.
- Experience with scripting and automation (e.g. Python, Bash) and tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or similar, with a strong preference for infrastructure‑as‑code practices.
- Demonstrated experience adopting and promoting Agile and DevOps practices to improve collaboration, delivery quality, and operational outcomes.
- Strong ability to decompose complex systems into clear technical workstreams, enabling engineers at all levels to contribute effectively.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to a range of stakeholders.
Highly Desirable Experience
- Experience delivering complex, connected systems in regulated sectors such as defence, national security, telecommunications, financial services, or automotive.
- Designing, deploying, and supporting solutions at the far‑edge in denied, disrupted, intermittent, or lossy communication environments.
- Building and maintaining secure application deployments on AWS, Azure, or GCloud.
- Background experience in IT support or operational environments.
Key Attributes
- Problem‑solver: Able to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues pragmatically and efficiently.
- Systems thinker: Comfortable reasoning about large‑scale, interconnected systems and balancing short‑term delivery with long‑term platform health.
- Detail‑oriented: Maintains high standards and adherence to best practices.
- Adaptable and self‑motivated: Learns quickly and continuously develops technical capability.
- Technical mentor: Develops engineers through guidance, review, and example rather than formal management.
- Collaborative: Works effectively across disciplines, sharing knowledge openly.
- Continuous improvement mindset: Proactively identifies opportunities to improve systems, processes, and ways of working.
- Agile mindset: Applies Agile principles pragmatically, facilitating alignment, prioritisation, and collaboration.
Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid‑working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part‑time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!
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