Software Engineer – Production Automation & AI-Assisted Reliability – 72096

Software Engineer – Production Automation & AI-Assisted Reliability
Location: Remote within the UK
Contract: Six months
Dates: September 2026 – March 2027
Hours: 40 hours per week
Pay rate: £55 per hour PAYE

About the role
We are recruiting two experienced Software Engineers for a six-month contract with a leading global technology company.

This is a senior backend production-engineering role supporting a large-scale live application operating across VR headsets, mobile devices and PCs. The successful engineers will build automation to maintain production reliability, cloud-streaming infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

A major focus of the position will be reducing repetitive operational and on-call work through AI-assisted tooling, automated diagnostics and self-healing systems.

This is not a traditional full-stack or feature-development role. It requires a hands-on engineer who can investigate complex failures across backend services, build systems, cloud infrastructure and deployment environments before implementing reliable, long-term automated solutions.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend automation that keeps a large-scale live application healthy.
• Support server-side services and cloud-streaming infrastructure across VR, mobile and PC.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD, build, release and cloud-deployment pipelines.
• Develop AI-assisted tools that identify production problems, investigate likely root causes and recommend or implement repairs.
• Build tooling that detects broken builds and traces failures to the responsible code, commit, dependency or infrastructure change.
• Automate crash triage, production monitoring, incident detection and remediation.
• Monitor reliability, capacity, performance, latency and session health.
• Investigate production regressions, incidents and outages and implement lasting fixes.
• Reduce repetitive manual operational and on-call activity through automation.
• Design self-healing systems and automated remediation capabilities.
• Complete infrastructure, platform and dependency migrations while protecting downstream CI/CD availability.
• Maintain compatibility between native and cloud-streamed versions of the application.
• Work autonomously and take ownership of complex production and build-system problems.
• Communicate technical decisions, risks and progress clearly to engineering and operational stakeholders.

Essential experience

• Eight or more years of professional software-engineering experience, or demonstrably equivalent expertise.
• Strong backend or server-side software-engineering experience.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD, build, release and cloud-deployment pipelines at scale.
• Experience supporting cloud services and server-side systems in live production environments.
• Strong production-engineering, site-reliability, platform-engineering or live-service operations experience.
• Experience improving production reliability, performance, capacity and latency.
• Experience with AI-assisted developer tooling, coding agents or systems that generate, modify or repair code.
• Experience creating tooling that identifies broken builds and traces failures to a specific change.
• Strong production monitoring, crash-triage, root-cause-analysis and incident-response experience.
• Evidence of reducing recurring operational or on-call work through automation.
• Experience completing infrastructure or dependency migrations without disrupting production services or downstream pipelines.
• Strong cloud experience across AWS, GCP or Azure.
• Ability to work independently with limited day-to-day supervision.
• Clear communication and stakeholder-management skills.

Desirable experience

• Cloud gaming, cloud application streaming or remote-rendering experience.
• Experience supporting VR applications or cross-platform environments.
• Experience maintaining compatibility across VR, mobile and PC.
• Experience monitoring streamed workloads, including capacity, latency or session orchestration.
• Experience supporting large-scale consumer or user-generated-content applications.
• Familiarity with large monorepo build systems and complex dependency management.
• Experience designing self-healing systems or autonomous remediation solutions.
• Asset-delivery, content-delivery or CDN pipeline experience.
• Previous experience within a large multinational technology organisation.

About you
You will be a senior, hands-on backend engineer who combines strong software-engineering ability with an operational and reliability mindset.

You should be comfortable taking complete ownership of complex production issues, identifying their underlying causes and building automation that prevents them from recurring. The role requires someone proactive, highly autonomous and capable of making progress without extensive oversight.

Additional information
This is a remote position, but candidates must be based in the UK and have the right to work in the UK. The contract is offered on a PAYE basis at £55 per hour. The selection process is expected to include two interview stages. No permanent conversion opportunity has currently been confirmed.