Senior Agent Platform Engineer
About this role
WHO WE ARE Proxima Fusion is Europe’s fastest-growing fusion company and the continent’s best-funded fusion player, as well as the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Backed by over €650M and powered by a growing team across Munich, Zurich, and Oxford, we are developing the hardware and infrastructure needed to deliver the world’s first commercial stellarator fusion power plant.Our concept advances the most mature fusion technology out there, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, through two next-generation machines: Alpha and Stellaris. Our work combines stellarator optimization, advanced computation, machine learning, and high-temperature superconducting magnets to unlock higher-performance designs that were previously out of reach.Turning these designs into a functioning fusion power plant requires excellence and ownership across every discipline, from physics and engineering to software, manufacturing, law, and business functions.WHY JOIN PROXIMA FUSIONYou will get to work on some of the most complex tech challenges to bring abundant, safe, clean energy to the world.You'll get to join and learn from an exceptional selection of accomplished and driven individuals.Do your life’s best work and enjoy the journey.Get to show that big things are possible in Europe when you assemble the best talent.YOUR IMPACTTechnical owner of Proxima’s AI agent platform, turning autonomous agents into reliable everyday colleagues for physicists and engineers.Own the platform architecture, technical delivery, and day-to-day operation.Scale the platform from an early product into reliable, governed infrastructure used across the company.Enable agents to work across knowledge bases, write code, run simulations, and support engineering workflows.Work within the Enterprise AI Team Lead’s overall vision while owning how that vision is technically implemented.Use strong technical judgment to influence and shape the platform roadmap.Identify and propose new platform features based on hands-on experience and feedback from internal users.Build a platform that engineers and scientists can trust for real, production-level work. WHAT YOU WILL DOOwn the design, delivery, and operation of our agent platform: the runtime and its primitives: durable sessions, sandboxed execution environments, long-running task execution, memory, and tool integrationTurn a rapidly evolving agent ecosystem into stable platform building blocks: evaluate harnesses, models, and protocols as they emerge, and decide what becomes a supported primitive versus a passing experimentCo-Design the integration layer that connects agents to internal and external systems, from enterprise tools to our scientific computing stack, and the standards for how tools, skills, and context are exposed to agentsMake autonomy safe and governable: permission and approval flows with human-in-the-loop escalation, capability boundaries, audit logging, cost and token controls, and hardening against prompt injection and tool abuseBuild the evaluation and observability layer for non-deterministic systems: session tracing, quality evals, and cost/latency visibility, so we know agents work before our users have to find outOperate what you build on Google Cloud with production discipline: reliability, failure handling, and observabilityWork directly with demanding technical users and feed their feedback and your technical judgment into the platform roadmap you shape together with the team leadWHO YOU AREMust haveYou have 5+ years of software engineering experience, with real depth in Python and distributed backend systemsYou have architected, built, and operated production-grade agentic or LLM systems well beyond the prototype phaseYou know the current agent ecosystem hands-on: MCP, agent SDKs and CLIs, multi-agent orchestration patterns, sandboxed code execution and have formed opinions on where the abstractions should sitYou have run production workloads on Kubernetes and a major cloud (ideally GCP), and know what it takes to keep stateful, long-running services aliveYou treat evaluation and observability as platform features, not afterthoughtsYou take security seriously as a design constraintYou think in platforms and internal productsYou are a low-ego, high-clarity communicator who can work directly with expert users and build consensus across teamsYou have experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CDNice to haveExperience with model gateways and routingExposure to scientific or high-performance computing: batch schedulers, HPC clusters, or simulation-heavy environmentsOpen-source contributions to AI/agent toolingA track record of technical mentorshipINTERVIEW PROCESSRecruiter Interview (30-60 min)Technical Screening (30 min)Technical Panel (3x60 min)CEO call (30min)*This role sits at "L3" of our framework, please inquire during the recruitment process for further information.At Proxima Fusion, our mission is bold: making limitless clean energy a reality. To get there, we need a high-performing, diverse team that brings different perspectives, challenges assumptions, and builds together with purpose. We know that diversity of thought and experience leads to better ideas, stronger execution, and a more resilient team. We don’t look at how you identify, what you look like, who you choose to worship or what ethnicity you are. We care about what you can bring to the table.
What this role is, and what else it is called
Employers in Oxford advertise this kind of work as Senior Infrastructure & Platform Engineer, Senior Azure DevOps Engineer – Surrey or Hampshire/Hybrid/WFH and Senior DevOps Engineer too, so it is worth searching more than one wording. It is a senior DevOps, Platform & SRE role in Oxford, advertised as on-site.
About hiring at Proximafusion
Proximafusion has 1 other live technology role on its careers page, across Software Engineering and DevOps, Platform & SRE. Elsewhere in its adverts Proximafusion asks for Docker and Linux. See all Proximafusion roles, salaries and stack.
How this role compares to the market
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Technologies mentioned
Detected on Proximafusion's careers page. ProdReady Recruitment lists this vacancy as an aggregator and is not the employer; applications go to the employer's own site. More IT jobs in South East.