Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Location: Remote - Gulf Standard Time preferred (with occasional travel to Abu Dhabi if required)
Travel: Occasional
Compensation: Exceptional package reflecting seniority, technical expertise and impact

What's in it for you?

This is not a role for a traditional DevOps engineer or someone looking for the next step in their career.

We're looking for an established infrastructure leader who has already designed and operated production Kubernetes platforms, managed GPU clusters and delivered secure, air-gapped environments at scale.

You'll join a small team of exceptional engineers building sovereign AI infrastructure deployed into some of the world's most secure environments. The technical challenges are genuinely complex, the standards are exceptionally high and every engineer has a direct influence on the platform's evolution.

This is the calibre of engineering environment where technical excellence is expected, ownership is assumed and only proven expertise earns a seat at the table.

If you haven't operated at this level before, this role is unlikely to be the right fit.

Package & Benefits

• Exceptional package reflecting seniority and technical impact

• Remote-first working with future relocation opportunities

• Work alongside an elite team of senior engineers and technical leaders

• Direct ownership of infrastructure architecture and platform strategy

• Exposure to cutting-edge AI, GPU and sovereign infrastructure technologies

• High levels of autonomy with the opportunity to shape engineering standards

Why this business

Our client is one of the most ambitious companies building sovereign AI infrastructure today. Their technology powers secure, mission-critical platforms for governments and highly regulated organisations, operating within air-gapped environments where security, resilience and performance are paramount.

As demand for sovereign AI continues to accelerate, they are investing in exceptional engineering talent to build infrastructure capable of supporting some of the world's most advanced AI deployments.

The engineering team is deliberately small because they believe exceptional engineers outperform large teams. You'll work alongside recognised technical specialists who value deep expertise, thoughtful engineering and solving problems that few organisations ever encounter. Every engineer has a genuine voice in architectural decisions and the autonomy to make a lasting impact.

What you'll be doing

• Lead the architecture and delivery of Kubernetes-based infrastructure across sovereign, on-premises and air-gapped environments

• Own production GPU platform operations, infrastructure reliability and platform scalability

• Define Infrastructure-as-Code standards while building secure CI/CD pipelines for disconnected deployment environments

• Champion Site Reliability Engineering practices including SLOs, incident response, post-mortems and mentor other infrastructure engineers

What you'll bring

• 8+ years' commercial experience in Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering

• Deep production Kubernetes expertise managing complex, large-scale environments - managed cloud Kubernetes experience alone will not be sufficient

• Proven experience operating production GPU clusters using technologies such as NVIDIA H100, together with Terraform, Ansible and Helm

• Strong background delivering secure on-premises or air-gapped infrastructure within highly regulated or mission-critical environments

Please note: This is a highly specialised appointment. Candidates without demonstrable commercial experience operating production Kubernetes platforms, GPU infrastructure and secure on-premises environments are unlikely to be considered.

Who this suits

You're recognised by your peers as a technical authority rather than simply an infrastructure engineer. You're motivated by solving problems that most organisations never face and take pride in building resilient platforms that perform under the most demanding conditions.

You're looking for an environment where exceptional engineering is the standard, where you'll work alongside equally capable colleagues and where your decisions will shape technology deployed at national scale.

If you're looking for another cloud infrastructure role, this probably isn't it. If you're ready to work on some of the most demanding infrastructure challenges in AI, we'd like to hear from you.

Apply now for a confidential conversation with Walker Lovell.