Platform Desktop Engineer

Overview

In this Platform Desktop Engineer role, you’ll own the Linux image lifecycle for the firm’s desktop estate and the tooling that provisions it, enabling reliable, scalable environments for high‑impact research. You’ll work within Core Infrastructure to maintain image builds, provisioning pipelines, and security posture, collaborating with Linux Engineering and Security teams. This is a small, cross‑functional team with broad remit and growth opportunities across infrastructure disciplines. You’ll contribute to a platform that accelerates discovery and supports the firm’s research ambitions.

Pay / Benefits

• competitive compensation with annual bonus
• lunch provided
• 30 days’ annual leave
• 9% pension contributions
• comprehensive healthcare and life assurance
• cycle-to-work scheme

• Maintain OS image build pipeline (Dagger, Packer, Jenkins, Bash)
• Develop and operate Python-based provisioning tooling across OpenStack and Ironic
• Manage estate security including certificate lifecycle, vulnerability remediation and patching
• Coordinate changes with testing, staged rollouts and rollback plans
• Monitor estate health and dashboards; troubleshoot configuration issues
• Provide user support and handle incidents escalated from first line
• Support joiner/mover/leaver processes with HR
• Manage hardware provisioning and lifecycle (diagnostics, firmware, warranties, RMAs)
• Contribute to capacity planning for physical and virtual resources
• Support incident response and drive remedial actions to completion
• Escalate complex issues with clear technical diagnosis to Linux Engineering and other teams

• Strong Linux administration (packages, filesystems, permissions, networking)
• Troubleshooting across logs, CPU, memory, I/O, and network performance
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines for OS image creation
• Python scripting for internal tooling
• Security best practices and risk‑aware judgment
• Experience with monitoring and dashboards for system health
• OpenStack and Ironic experience for bare metal and VM provisioning at scale
• Hardware provisioning and lifecycle understanding (BMC, lights‑out)
• Experience supporting technical users in live environments
• Excellent communication; clear explanations of trade-offs
• Calm, methodical incident handling and escalation

• strong communication
• calm, methodical approach to incidents
• collaboration across teams
• Linux administration
• CI/CD for OS images
• Python scripting