Lead IT Engineer

About us

Re-architecting Engineering for the Age of Intelligence

PhysicsX is the physics AI company for industrials. The company’s mission is to accelerate hardware innovation by overhauling what industrial engineering and manufacturing look like today. PhysicsX is building a new simulation software stack to deliver deep physics AI enablement across the entire engineering lifecycle. The company partners with leading organisations in aerospace & defence, automotive, semiconductors, materials, and energy & renewables, supporting them on some of their most critical and complex challenges. PhysicsX is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in London, New York, and Singapore and an expanding presence in the Bay Area.

The Role

As IT Lead Engineer, you'll own the infrastructure that lets our engineers push CPU/GPU-heavy physics simulations without hitting a wall. You'll bring HPC operator experience rather than generalist sysadmin breadth, paired with the calm to fix a boardroom AV fault and the judgment to mentor the engineer who caused it. This is a high-ownership role in a scale-up: you'll be building process as much as running it, and you'll be the person people escalate to when "it's slow" needs a real root cause, not a restart.

What you will do

Own and evolve our HPC environment: cluster administration, job scheduling (e.g., Slurm/PBS/LSF), performance tuning, and capacity planning for compute-heavy engineering workloads.

Experience with Entra ID Governance: Access Reviews, Identity Protection, Privileged Identity Management (PIM) at scale.

Provide hands-on IT support across the company with an automation-first mindset

Mentor and develop junior IT/support engineers, building a culture of ownership and technical rigor rather than ticket-closing.

Act as an escalation point for complex or high-priority issues across HPC, dev tooling, and general IT support.

Configure, support and improve developer tooling (e.g. Github Actions/Workflows, JFrog, Chainguard)

What you bring to the table

7–10 years of experience in IT infrastructure, systems administration, or HPC support, with at least 2–3 years in a lead or senior technical role.

Demonstrable hands-on experience managing HPC infrastructure including cluster administration, job schedulers, and performance tuning for CPU/GPU workloads.

Experience with compliance frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001) and able to translate control requirements into actual technical implementation (access reviews, logging, encryption, change management), not just pass an audit checklist.

Strong Linux administration skills, plus comfort supporting a mixed Linux/macOS/Windows environment typical of an engineering org.

Experience supporting developer tooling and workflows including CI/CD systems, version control, license management, and internal engineering platforms.

Experience in cloud-native environments across multiple cloud vendors.

Strong experience designing and setting up zero trust environments.

Comfort working in a scale-up: fewer guardrails, more ownership, and a need to build process as well as solve problems.

Strong networking fundamentals and hands-on operational experience: routing and switching, segmentation, firewalls, VPN, enterprise wireless, DNS/DHCP/IPAM and TLS/PKI, with confident packet-level troubleshooting.

Excellent structured troubleshooting: you can take an ambiguous "it's slow" report, isolate the layer, prove the cause and prevent the recurrence and teach that method to someone else.

Strong automation and scripting ability (Python, Bash, PowerShell) with infrastructure as code and configuration management as your default way of working.

Nice to Have Skills

Strong AV experience: designing and building AV from scratch, not just supporting existing setups.

Compliance automation platforms (Vanta, Drata).

Relevant certifications (e.g. CCNA,CCNP, SC-300, MS-102, RHCE, Jamf etc.)

Experience configuring security tooling …