Sourcing Criteria and Requirements for Senior Engineer - Infrastructure / DevOps

Must Haves

• Extensive experience (8+ years) in Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, or SRE

• Proven track record building and managing production infrastructure from the ground up

• Deep expertise in Kubernetes in production at scale (beyond managed cloud services)

• Strong cloud infrastructure knowledge (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Infrastructure as Code proficiency (Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar)

• Experience with GPU cluster management (NVIDIA H100 or equivalent) in production

• Experience with air-gapped, on-premises, or sovereign deployment environments

• Strong automation mindset with a focus on scalability, security, and operational resilience

• Experience designing secure, scalable production environments for enterprise or government clients

• Strong incident response discipline: SLOs, runbooks, post-mortems

• Platform reliability and operational resilience expertise

• Ability to work independently in a growing technology business

Nice to Haves

• Background in cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, defence technology, or other highly regulated environments

• Experience with InfiniBand networking and NVIDIA NVLink topology

• Prior leadership or mentoring experience of infrastructure/platform teams

• Familiarity with FIPS-compliant and HSM-protected environments

Location and Working Pattern

• Initially remote with travel to Abu Dhabi as required

• Future relocation welcomed but not essential

• Preference for candidates working close to Gulf Standard Time for collaboration

Other Preferences

• Candidates should demonstrate an engineering mindset prioritising reliability, scalability, and automation rather than traditional sysadmin roles

• Search should include varied titles such as Senior DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure Architect

• Experience supporting software engineering teams is important

Business Context

• Role supports sovereign, intelligence-led AI systems in complex, high-security environments

• Infrastructure stability, security and scalability are fundamental to Elile's products

• Responsible for infrastructure underpinning AI and intelligence platforms rather than AI model development itself