Infrastructure Engineer - Robotics & Autonomous Systems

Job Title: Infrastructure Engineer - Robotics & Autonomous Systems

Location: Zürich, Switzerland

Job Type: Full-time, Hybrid

I'm representing an early-stage autonomous systems company based at Technopark Zürich. They're building the intelligence layer for physical security, a hardware-agnostic orchestration platform that unifies ground robots, drones, and existing camera infrastructure into one coordinated autonomous system.

The founding team holds PhDs from Cambridge and UCL, including a patent from Qualcomm's Embodied AI team. Backed by a top-tier European deep tech VC, ESA BIC, and NVIDIA Inception. Under 12 months old and already with real customer traction in critical infrastructure and defence.

This is a founding-level infrastructure hire. The systems you build will define how this company ships software for years.

The role,

You'll own the cloud platform connecting their robot fleet to operator intelligence. End-to-end: cloud foundations, CI/CD, secure networking, container orchestration, edge fleet management, and developer experience. Because customers operate in security-sensitive environments, you'll care as much about hardened on-prem deployments as you do about speed.

What you'll own,

• Cloud infrastructure: AWS or GCP, networking, IAM, security, cost controls
• Secure networking: VPNs, PKI and certificate management, TLS, hardened connectivity between cloud, operators, and robots in the field
• CI/CD pipelines for both cloud services and on-robot software
• Container orchestration: Kubernetes and K3s for edge and on-prem deployment
• Edge and fleet management: OTA updates, configuration management, telemetry, secure field connectivity
• Observability across cloud and edge: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry
• Developer experience: internal tooling that removes friction for the engineering team
• Security and compliance: hardening, secrets management, audit trails for enterprise and government customers

What I'm looking for,

• 4+ years in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Strong with Kubernetes, including lightweight distributions such as K3s
• Infrastructure-as-code: Terraform or Pulumi
• Solid networking and security fundamentals: VPNs, TLS, PKI, firewalls
• CI/CD experience: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent
• Comfortable writing code in Python or Go
• A track record of building developer-facing platforms engineers actually liked using

Nice to have,

• Edge device or robot fleet deployment experience (OTA, rollback, A/B updates)
• On-prem or air-gapped environment experience
• Background in defence, enterprise, fintech, or healthcare
• ML workload support: training infrastructure, model serving, GPU orchestration

What's on offer,

• Founding-team seniority and meaningful equity
• Full infrastructure ownership from day one, no layers, no committees
• Direct access to a PhD-level founding team in AI, Robotics, and Physics
• In-person in Zürich, with visa and relocation support available
• A small, international team serious about building without taking itself too seriously