Hybrid Principal Infrastructure Engineer

at Rowden

• Job title: Principal Infrastructure Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Ansible, AWS, Azure, Cloud, Python, Terraform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Bristol, United Kingdom

About the role

• Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Rowden, focusing on critical technology solutions for national security. Leading technical architecture and mentoring teams in a dynamic environment.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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!