Who Are We?

Smarkets is transforming the betting exchange space by delivering world-class technology and the best-priced markets in the industry. With over £29 billion in traded volume since 2010, we’ve built a product-led, transparent, and fair platform that challenges the norms of traditional betting.

As a Series B tech company, we pride ourselves on engineering excellence, lean product thinking, and scientific rigor. With a close-knit team and a passion for innovation, Smarkets is where top talent comes to make a real impact.

Now, we’re looking for a DevOps Engineer to help scale our infrastructure and empower our developers with streamlined, self-service tooling and operational excellence.

About the Role

You’ll join the Cloud Infrastructure Team, responsible for real-time distributed systems that power our trading engine—As a pivotal team member, you’ll craft and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performance cloud-based systems—while building the platforms that empower our developers to move fast, deploy confidently, and scale effortlessly.

You won’t just be building cloud infrastructure—you’ll be crafting a highly autonomous environment where ownership is expected, experimentation is encouraged, and innovation is embedded into everything we do. You'll shape the foundation of our cloud-native stack, blending visionary infrastructure architecture with the practical realities of a high-growth, high-scale environment.

This is a role where infrastructure meets engineering productivity: part DevOps, part Platform, 100% mission-critical.

What You'll Do

• Design and Own Infrastructure: Architect and maintain robust, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure on AWS using Terraform, Kubernetes, and cloud-native best practices.

• Champion Platform Engineering: Build and evolve the internal developer platform (IDP) that empowers engineers to self-serve infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling.

• Debug Production Systems: Triage issues across layers of the stack—Kubernetes, cloud services, networking, applications, data pipelines—and drive root cause analysis and resolution.

• Drive DevOps Practices: Implement infrastructure as code (IaC), observability, alerting, and environment provisioning to support engineering teams and production systems.

• Promote Engineering Excellence: Establish and uphold standards and best practices across infrastructure, operations, and software delivery.

• Scale Microservices Architecture: Lead the buildout of resilient Kubernetes-based microservices across environments, optimizing for cost, performance, and security.

• Own Security & Compliance: Take point on security posture and audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001), ensuring our platforms meet rigorous compliance and operational standards.

• System Reliability: Optimize performance and availability for high-throughput, low-latency services that power the betting exchange.

• Be a Force Multiplier: Mentor other engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and lead initiatives with broad technical and business impact.

Your Toolkit

• Cloud & Infrastructure: Deep experience with AWS (EKS, VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, RDS), Terraform (IaC), and Linux systems.

• Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes expertise, including Helm, ingress configuration, scaling strategies, and security hardening.

• Scripting & Automation: Strong skills in Python and Bash; automation is your second nature.

• Networking & Security: Proficiency in VPNs, VPC peering, DNS, TLS, and identity management (OIDC/SAML).

• Observability & Operations: Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, ELK stack, Sentry, and building robust monitoring/alerting pipelines.

• Developer Platform Tools: Hands-on with GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Backstage, or similar IDP tooling to build cohesive internal platforms.

• Data Infrastructure: Experience supporting PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and object storage like S3 in production environments.

• Process & Compliance: Familiarity with security frameworks, incident response, RBAC/least privilege models, and compliance workflows.

Bonus if you have

• Experience with platform engineering concepts like golden paths, self-service portals, or PaaS-style abstractions.

• Built or contributed to developer enablement or SRE tooling platforms.

• Prior experience scaling platform infrastructure in a fast-growing startup environment.

What You Bring

• 6+ years in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering roles.

• Proven ability to balance long-term vision with short-term execution.

• A collaborative spirit that uplifts others and fosters strong technical culture.

• Passion for reliability, scalability, and simplicity in infrastructure.

Our Values

• Push to win

• Make others better

• Give a shit

• Be a pro

• Bring the energy

Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what’s expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us.

Benefits

We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard.
We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development.

These include:

• Stock options which vests over 4 years

• Pension scheme - an impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same

• Health insurance

• Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee and soft drinks also included)

• We're a member of a cycle to work scheme

• We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training

• 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year!

• Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home

• 20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year

• We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don't need to worry about what to make or buy for lunch as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in-house chef Alex!

What happens next​

We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around.

• CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible

• HackerRank Exercise - At home test to show off your skills

• Let’s chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role

• Technical Interview - Live Technical Interview + System Design Interview

• In Office Interview - Experience & Mindset + Lunch with other colleagues in the team + LT Chat