AI Infrastructure Coder at Student.com · London

AI Infrastructure Coder

Role Purpose

As Student.com expands across the US, we are looking for an experienced, hands-on AI Infrastructure Coder to take ownership of the infrastructure including AI and platform services that underpin our business.

Your primary responsibility will be to keep our platforms secure, reliable, resilient and cost-effective, with particular focus on security, disaster recovery and business continuity. You will establish clear ownership, strengthen operational processes and move our approach from reactive problem-solving towards proactive prevention and continuous improvement.

Working closely with our CTO and engineering colleagues, you will combine technical leadership with practical delivery. This role will suit someone who enjoys building and improving infrastructure, takes responsibility for its performance and understands how reliable technology supports customer experience and commercial growth.

Business Context

Student.com’s platform connects students with accommodation providers and supports the booking journeys, partner relationships and internal operations that drive our business.

As we grow, we need infrastructure that can support increasing demand, enable safe and efficient development, and minimise disruption to students, landlords and commercial partners. You need to help support AI initiatives specifically providing infrastructure for agentic systems and knowledge of supporting models of cloud platforms like AWS & GCP.

This role will provide dedicated ownership of those foundations, reducing the operational burden on other engineers and allowing them to focus on customer-facing features, partner integrations and future platform capabilities.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure Ownership & Technical Leadership

• Own the infrastructure and platform engineering roadmap, prioritising improvements in line with business needs, technical risks and available resources.
• Design, build, maintain and improve secure, scalable cloud infrastructure.
• Establish clear infrastructure standards, operating procedures and technical documentation.
• Identify and address infrastructure technical debt, operational weaknesses and dependencies on individual team members.
• Provide practical technical guidance and mentor colleagues in infrastructure and operational best practice.
• Manage relevant infrastructure suppliers and services, reviewing performance, suitability and cost.

Platform Reliability & Incident Management

• Take ownership of production infrastructure reliability, availability and performance.
• Establish meaningful service measures and targets, with monitoring and reporting that make platform health visible.
• Improve observability, logging, monitoring and alerting so issues can be identified and addressed early.
• Lead infrastructure incident response, coordinating technical investigation, recovery and stakeholder updates.
• Conduct constructive post-incident reviews, identify underlying causes and ensure agreed improvements are completed.
• Improve redundancy, capacity planning and performance to reduce avoidable disruption and support growth.
• Help define sustainable arrangements for incident escalation and out-of-hours support.

Security & Risk Management

• Own infrastructure security controls and work with engineering colleagues to embed security into platform design and day-to-day operations.
• Strengthen identity and access management, applying least-privilege access and appropriate authentication controls.
• Maintain effective processes for patching, vulnerability remediation, secrets management and secure configuration.
• Protect infrastructure, systems and data through appropriate network controls, encryption and monitoring.
• Identify and communicate technical risks, recommending proportionate improvements based on their potential business impact.
• Support security reviews, supplier assessments and relevant audit or compliance requirements.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

• Own the technical disaster recovery approach and contribute to wider business continuity planning.
• Agree recovery priorities, recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives with relevant stakeholders.
• Implement and maintain backup, restoration and failover arrangements for critical systems and data.
• Test recovery procedures regularly, document the results and resolve identified gaps.
• Maintain clear recovery runbooks so the business can respond effectively to significant disruption.
• Identify single points of failure and reduce reliance on individual systems, suppliers or people.

Automation & Developer Experience

• Drive the adoption and improvement of Infrastructure as Code, ensuring changes are repeatable, version-controlled and reviewable.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support safe, efficient deployments and reliable rollback.
• Improve consistency across development, testing and production environments.
• Reduce manual administration and operational effort through practical automation.
• Provide tooling and documentation that help engineers develop, deploy and troubleshoot effectively.
• Work with developers to ensure new services are supportable, observable and secure from the outset.

Cloud Cost & Capacity Management

• Monitor cloud usage and expenditure, providing visibility of costs and opportunities for improvement.
• Optimise infrastructure resources while maintaining appropriate reliability, performance and security.
• Establish cost controls, budgets and alerts to reduce unexpected expenditure.
• Forecast capacity requirements and assess infrastructure choices against business growth plans.
• Balance immediate delivery needs with sustainable long-term architecture and operating costs.

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

• Work closely with the CTO and colleagues across Engineering, Product, Data and Commercial teams.
• Translate infrastructure priorities and technical risks into clear business implications.
• Contribute to technical planning and strategic discussions, bringing practical recommendations and constructive challenge.
• Share knowledge and maintain accessible documentation to strengthen team capability.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully to support investigation, automation, documentation and delivery, applying appropriate security controls and human review.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Significant hands-on experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps or a similar role, with ownership of production environments.
• Strong experience designing, operating and improving cloud infrastructure, ideally
• Experience running highly available systems and improving their reliability, resilience and performance.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code skills, ideally using Terraform / SST or equivalent
• A sound understanding of networking, cloud architecture, identity and access management, and infrastructure security.
• Real world experience of supporting AI infrastructure and agentic systems.
• Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation and environment management.
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, observability and effective alerting.within AWS / GCP.
• Experience leading incident response, investigating root causes and delivering preventative improvements.
• Practical experience implementing backups, testing restoration and developing disaster recovery procedures.
• Strong scripting and automation skills.
• Experience monitoring cloud expenditure and delivering cost improvements.
• The ability to prioritise independently, communicate clearly and work effectively within a collaborative engineering team.

Desirable

• Experience within a marketplace, SaaS, e-commerce or other transactional digital business.
• Experience supporting international platforms or geographically distributed teams.
• Experience contributing to security assurance, audits or compliance programmes.
• Familiarity with database resilience, recovery and performance considerations.
• Experience improving infrastructure within a growing business where resources and priorities need to be carefully balanced.
• Experience using AI-assisted tools within an engineering workflow.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers and container orchestration.

Personal Attributes

• Takes ownership: follows issues through to resolution and takes responsibility for the quality of the platform.
• Hands-on and practical: comfortable setting direction and carrying out the work needed to deliver it.
• Proactive: identifies risks early and builds improvements that prevent recurring problems.
• Calm under pressure: makes clear decisions and communicates effectively during incidents.
• Commercially aware: understands the relationship between infrastructure, customer experience, revenue and cost.
• Collaborative: builds strong working relationships and shares knowledge openly.
• Pragmatic: balances technical quality with business priorities and delivery needs.
• Open-minded: brings informed technical views and adapts when evidence or circumstances change.

What Success Looks Like

• Clear ownership and visibility of infrastructure health, risks, costs and priorities.
• Fewer avoidable incidents and faster detection and recovery when problems occur.
• Tested, documented disaster recovery arrangements for critical services.
• Stronger security controls and timely resolution of infrastructure vulnerabilities.
• More reliable deployments and less manual operational work.
• Infrastructure that supports business growth with appropriate performance and cost control.
• Greater engineering capacity for product development, integrations and strategic initiatives.

Benefits

We offer a competitive benefits package, including pension, healthcare, holidays, volunteering leave and a range of additional benefits designed to support your wellbeing.