Senior DevOps Engineer

Contract:                     Permanent or Contract considered

Location:                     Greater Oxford Area

Working Pattern:        Hybrid (2-3 days in office)

Salary:                          Competitive

A note from the Founders  

Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.  

We operate in some of the most complex and high‑stakes environments in the world - defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now, will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.    

You will work closely with all the team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day in the work we do.  

If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters -we would love to hear from you.  

Who We Are  

Founded in 2020, Oxford Dynamics (OD) is a fast‑growing UK deep‑tech company developing AI and robotic systems designed to operate in mission‑critical environments.  

Our flagship AVIS (A Very Intelligent System) AI framework fuses multi‑modal data - text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds - enabling operators to interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. Our STRIDER robotic platform performs autonomous tasks in hazardous environments, protecting people while extending operational reach.  

Our ambition is simple but demanding: to converge AI and robotics so machines can sense, understand and act in complex, real‑world environments.  

We work with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives. 

What you will be doing here/ why this role matters 

Oxford Dynamics is a small team who rely on a collaborative and positive approach and so the right attitude for this role is equally as important as experience. We are at an important stage and time in our growth, and as a Senior DevOps Engineer you will be an essential part of our success.

We are looking for a seasoned DevOps professional with deep hands-on expertise in AWS, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD who can also drive cloud-native security. You will design, build and audit scalable infrastructure, automate delivery pipelines and champion cost-efficient, highly available platforms while owning key processes that will help OD remain compliant with our various certifications also.

Key Responsibilities 

Your responsibilities will include, but not limited to: 

• End-to-end cloud ownership – architect, implement and maintain multi-account, multi-region environments using IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm).
• Platform reliability & automation – manage Kubernetes clusters (EKS/OpenShift), container registries and service meshes; create GitHub Actions / Argo CD pipelines for zero-touch deployments.
• Security hardening – lead security-posture reviews, implement GuardDuty, CloudWatch and IAM best practices.
• SRE & monitoring – uphold SLAs through observability stacks, proactive alerting and performance tuning of distributed systems.
• Collaboration & enablement – automate repetitive tasks, mentor developers and champion DevSecOps best practice across teams.
• Policy & audit ownership - steward the regular audits we need to put in place to remain compliant with industry standards ensuring provenance.
• Backup & DR - design AWS Backup plans, run annual restore drills, maintain RPO/RTO dashboards.
• Capacity & cost optimisation - run the monthly Capacity & Availability Checklist; leverage Compute Optimizer, Savings Plans and Graviton.
• Drift detection & golden images - operate Terraform/Helm drift alerts, AMI & container image pipelines with Inspector v2 scanning.
• Incident & hot-fix response - coordinate emergency changes, rollbacks and post-incident reviews.