Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer - Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering)

JOB TITLE: Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer - Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering)

SALARY:

Non-London: £72,702-£88,858

London: £84,051-£102,729

LOCATION(S): Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh OR London

HOURS: Full-time

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites

About this opportunity

Within the Chief Security Office (CSO) our role is to protect the Group and our customers from security threats, and to enable the Group's businesses to make change to their services safely and quickly.

We are establishing a new Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering) Team with a bold mission: to build the Group's agentic vulnerability research platform, enabling AI-powered vulnerability discovery, exploit validation, risk prioritisation, and remediation verification at unprecedented scale and speed.

As a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer, you will build and operate the infrastructure that the harness runs on. Autonomous agents executing offensive security workloads demand an unusually high bar: strong isolation, tightly controlled egress, hardened runtimes, and complete evidential traceability. You will design that platform - making it fast for researchers and engineers to work on, and impossible to misuse.

What you'll be doing:

• Design, build, and operate the Kubernetes-based platform hosting agentic research workloads, including ephemeral and isolated execution environments.
• Own infrastructure-as-code across GCP using Terraform, delivering reproducible, reviewable, and policy-compliant environments.
• Engineer secure container and VM images with hardened baselines, minimal attack surface, and automated patching.
• Implement egress-controlled networking, network policy, service mesh controls, and segmentation to ensure agents can only reach sanctioned targets.
• Build CI/CD pipelines with integrated supply-chain security: SBOMs, image signing, artefact provenance, and automated policy gates.
• Deliver comprehensive observability - logs, metrics, distributed traces, and cost telemetry - across long-running, non-deterministic agent workloads.
• Build evidence-capture pipelines: immutable audit trails, artefact retention, and reproducible run records suitable for assurance and regulatory scrutiny.
• Manage secrets, identity, and workload authentication with least-privilege access across all platform components.
• Partner with AI Engineering to ensure agent runtimes scale efficiently and fail safely, and with Security Architecture to evidence control effectiveness.

Why join us?

We're transforming at pace. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to change the way we meet the needs of our 28 million customers. We're growing, and we'd love you to be part of the journey.

What we're looking for:

• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience: workload design, networking, autoscaling, RBAC, and multi-tenancy isolation.
• Strong Terraform and infrastructure-as-code skills, with a track record of managing production cloud estates.
• Substantial GCP experience (GKE, IAM, VPC/networking, Cloud Build/Artifact Registry, or equivalents) - or comparable depth in another major cloud with willingness to work in GCP.
• Container and VM hardening expertise, including image minimisation, runtime security, and vulnerability management.
• Practical experience implementing egress control, network policy, and segmentation in cloud-native environments.
• Strong CI/CD engineering skills and experience embedding security controls into delivery pipelines.
• Observability expertise across logging, tracing, and metrics, including designing for auditability and evidence retention.
• A security-first mindset with the judgement to balance researcher velocity against containment requirements.
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And any of these would be great:

• Experience building platforms for offensive security, malware analysis, or other high-risk workloads requiring strong isolation.
• Experience supporting AI/ML or LLM workloads, including GPU scheduling, inference infrastructure, or agent runtime environments.
• Cloud or Kubernetes certifications, or cyber security related qualifications and trainings.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, platform, or security tooling.
• Experience operating within highly regulated environments such as financial services, including evidencing controls to audit and risk functions.

We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. Whilst this job advert may reference specific years of experience, we recognise that skills are developed in many ways, so if you have relevant, transferable experience, we encourage you to apply.

This is a place for you

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we're committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative. We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme. We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Ready to make an impact? Apply today.