Senior Production Engineer — Infrastructure & Security

About Aykua

Aykua is a Cambridge-based, venture-backed startup building AI systems to automate medical administration, reducing delays, errors and manual work for clinics. We're a lean team with significant opportunities to grow with the company.

The role

As one of our first engineering hires, you'll own platform architecture, reliability, technical security and production operations, writing software and automation to improve how we deploy, observe and recover our systems. You'll work directly with the CTO, who agrees priorities with you, resolves decisions spanning the platform and application, and retains company-level accountability for security and compliance.

Our stack includes GitHub-based CI/CD, AWS, GCP, Terraform/OpenTofu, Nix/NixOS, PostgreSQL, event sourcing and Erlang/OTP. Our production code uses PureScript targeting JavaScript and Erlang. You don't need experience with every part, but substantial production ownership is essential.

What you'll do

• Own AWS and GCP infrastructure as code using Terraform/OpenTofu, with reviewed, reproducible changes.
• Maintain Nix/NixOS development, build and deployment environments and reliable CI/CD, including safe releases and rollback.
• Establish monitoring, actionable alerts, runbooks and escalation arrangements; lead incident response and fix underlying causes.
• Own backup and recovery, including tested PostgreSQL restores, and partner with the software engineer on safe application and database changes.
• Implement and operate security controls for access, workload identity, secrets, patching and audit logging; provide compliance evidence.
• Improve reliability, performance and recovery across Erlang/OTP, PostgreSQL and event-sourced systems, including safe replay and idempotent processing.
• Direct coding agents through substantial engineering work with clear specifications, independent tests, review and human accountability. Provide isolated environments, scoped permissions, secure credential handling and controlled production access.
• Use behaviour-driven development: define operational acceptance scenarios and write failing checks before implementation, using infrastructure, deployment and recovery tests to independently verify agent-assisted changes.
• Provide deployment, observability and evaluation infrastructure for LLM and agent workflows; the software engineer owns application evaluation datasets, metrics and regression checks.
• Manage capacity, performance, costs and suppliers; automate repetitive work and share operational knowledge.

What we're looking for

• 12+ years of professional experience independently building and operating production systems, including cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on AWS and infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform, OpenTofu or comparable tooling.
• Evidence of diagnosing incidents, restoring service, testing recovery and fixing underlying causes.
• Practical experience implementing and operating production security controls.
• Strong software engineering and automated-testing skills, including reading, debugging and changing backend code yourself and with agents.
• Test-first development experience, turning operational acceptance criteria into executable checks; no particular BDD framework is required.
• Sound judgement about distributed systems, concurrency, data integrity and reliability.
• Experience with deployment automation and reproducible environments, and willingness to learn Nix/NixOS and Erlang/OTP.
• Experience directing coding agents through substantial implementation work, from specifications and acceptance criteria to task coordination, independent testing, review and integration.
• Ownership of outcomes: prioritising risks, explaining trade-offs, working independently and helping colleagues ship and operate systems quickly while maintaining quality, security and compliance.

Nice to have

• Nix/NixOS in production.
• Running Erlang/Elixir/Gleam/OTP systems in production: deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting and performance tuning.
• Other functional programming experience.
• PostgreSQL design and operations, including backup and recovery; event-sourced systems, including replay, projections and recovery.
• SPIFFE/SPIRE, OpenBao/HashiCorp Vault or comparable workload identity and secrets-management systems.
• Applied cryptography or security architecture, including end-to-end encryption; SOC 2 (including Type II) or HITRUST controls, audit readiness and evidence collection.
• Healthcare or EHR experience.

Location and compensation

Working timezone: Europe/London (UK time, GMT/BST).

Full-time, hybrid near Cambridge, UK, with regular in-person work and some remote flexibility. We could be flexible for the right person.

£94,000, plus equity via stock options.

Interview process and applications

An initial call with one founder, followed by a formal interview with all founders.

Apply here on Wellfound with your CV and cover letter.

You must have the right to work in the UK or USA. We cannot offer visa sponsorship.