Platform Engineer (DevOps)

About Us

Food waste costs the world over $1 trillion a year. At Winnow, we're on a mission to change that — bringing AI-powered technology into hospitality kitchens to help eliminate waste at scale, with an ambition to save our clients $1 billion annually.

We started in London in 2013 with a simple belief: technology could make kitchens smarter and food systems more sustainable. Today that belief has grown into a global team spanning the UK, Romania, Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, Malaysia, North America, and Mexico, working across 90+ countries and 3,500+ sites.

We're proud of the results we help our clients achieve. Names like IKEA, Hilton, Accor, Marriott, IHG, Compass Group, Iberostar, and Mandarin Oriental trust us to cut their food waste by over 50% on average — and when our technology is fully adopted, it reduces pre-consumer waste by 50–70% and delivers food cost savings of 2–8%.

We're building something that matters, and the people who thrive here feel that every day. We're proud to have been named one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work and ranked #4 in the FoodTech 500 (2025) — recognition of both our innovation and our commitment to building a purpose-led company where people can make a real difference.

Our values

Our values aren't just words on a page. They sit at the centre of all that we do and shape our behaviours and the way we show up. If they resonate with you, we'd love to hear from you and for you to help us on our mission.

• People of action — done beats perfect. We move fast, learn faster
• Equal parts head and heart — we balance urgency with long-term thinking
• Hungry and humble — we're ambitious about our mission, not our egos
• Bravely honest — we say what we think, respectfully, with colleagues and customers alike
• Bound by food — it's what unites us, and it's what we're fighting for
• People and planet positive — we're leaving both better than we found them

The team

You'd be joining a small, senior platform team. We work closely with the engineers who rely on our platform daily, so communication and empathy for their day-to-day pain points matter as much as technical depth.

This is a team that's comfortable with ambiguity, a lot of what we're building (especially around agentic engineering) doesn't have a playbook yet, so we value people who can define the problem as well as solve it.

About the role

Most platform jobs mean AWS or GCP accounts and a Kubernetes cluster. This one also means a fleet of Linux IoT devices we design and manufacture ourselves, sitting in commercial kitchens around the world and streaming data back to us. There's an on-prem GPU cluster running ML workloads, and a data estate covering Aurora Postgres, MySQL, Redshift, Timescale, Mongo and DynamoDB.

We use that stack to fight food waste. Our devices watch what gets thrown away in professional kitchens and tell chefs how to stop it. It works, and we’re deployed in kitchens in 94 countries and counting.

Your customers are our own engineers and data scientists. Your job is to make their route to production short, safe and boring.

The problem we most want help with

We're working out how agentic engineering actually works at Winnow: how AI agents fit into the way we build, review, test and ship, and what platform they need underneath them to be useful rather than a liability.

This work has just begun. We need to design the guardrails, the golden paths, the evaluation, the permissions model and the cost controls. In large part it's a platform problem, and nobody seems to have properly solved it yet, here or anywhere else.

Key responsibilities:

• Design and build the platform for agentic engineering at Winnow: guardrails, golden paths, evals and cost controls, so our engineers can hand real work to an agent without it going badly.
• Build and run the golden paths for humans too, the paved routes our engineers use to ship to production without having to become infrastructure experts.
• Own our AWS and GCP infrastructure as code (Terraform with Terragrunt), across ECS for services and EKS for platform components like ELK, Grafana and Airflow.
• DevOps: Work with development teams to improve how we deploy. Faster feedback, fewer manual steps, safer rollbacks. We measure this and we expect it to get better.
• Support our data science and AI workloads: Airflow pipelines, SageMaker, and GPU scheduling on the on-prem cluster.
• Debug the hard things across clouds, databases, containers, network and edge.

Education and experience

• You are likely to be degree-educated having completed studies in Computer science, computer engineering, information technology, or a related field.
• Solid AWS experience, plus Linux and networking fundamentals you can reason from
• Essential skills:
• Infrastructure as code, Terraform or OpenTofu.
• Containers and orchestration: ECS, Kubernetes, or both.
• Bash, plus Python or Go at a level where you'd happily own a service.
• CI/CD pipelines you've built and maintained, not just used.
• You use AI coding assistants and agents day to day, and you have views on where they help, where they don't, and what would have to be true before you'd trust one with something that matters.
• Nice to have:
• Observability (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, ELK, New Relic)
• GitOps (ArgoCD or Flux)
• Airflow, SageMaker or MLflow
• LLM infrastructure such as inference serving, evals and LLM/ MCP gateways
• SecOps, container scanning (Checkov, Trivy) & secrets management
• Cloud and GPU cost optimisation
• Postgres, MySQL, Redshift beyond the basics
• IoT or edge fleet operations
• Ansible or similar
• Jenkins, Github Actions

Nobody has all of these. Apply anyway. We'd rather hire someone curious who learns fast than someone who ticks nine boxes and stops there.

Our Technology

Technology is at the forefront of what we do, and the success of our company is based on our world-class technology and on finding solutions to real-world problems that have not been solved to date. Our current stack includes:

• Designing and manufacturing IoT ‘smart’ edge devices and expanding using Linux-powered devices on the field collecting data using cutting-edge technologies.
• AWS Cloud focused (with minor parts in GCP and Azure) managed by Terraform with Terragrunt.
• AWS ECS for containerised “microservice” workloads.
• EKS for many of our platform components, including ELK, Grafana, Apache airflow.
• Databases include Aurora Postgres + MySQL, Redshift, Timescale, Mongo, and DynamoDB.
• Apache airflow and AWS SageMaker for data science uses.
• On-prem data center for ML GPU workloads.
• BitBucket, Jenkins, SonarQube, New Relic, Docker, Terraform.
• JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket (Atlassian products), Agile team using Scrum or Kanban (each team chooses the best approach to drive results).

Personal attributes

• You are results-driven and can demonstrate how you have delivered effective solutions in a timely manner.
• You take ownership without waiting to be asked, and you flag ambiguity early instead of guessing.
• You have experience working as part of a global team and building positive relationships with internal and external individuals across borders.
• You treat other engineers as customers, and you solve for the underlying problem, rather than patching the same solution for the nth time.
• You're pragmatic about trade-offs, and happy to ship something good now and improve it rather than wait for perfect.
• You work well across borders and time zones. Our team is distributed and much of the collaboration is written and asynchronous.
• You pitch in when you see someone stuck
• Able to organise self, including effective scheduling, prioritisation, and time management skills, managing multiple tasks in parallel and completing tasks to tight deadlines.
• Demonstrates excellent communication skills in English. You are a confident and articulate presenter. You communicate clearly in both written and spoken language. You listen attentively; you process and comprehend what you hear. You are also confident enough to ask questions and clarify ambiguous points.
• Track record of identifying problems, analysing options, and deploying sound decision-making skills.
• Motivated and curious, you love absorbing new information and are able to reliably recall and figure out how to rapidly apply it. You have the courage, when appropriate to learn new technology rather than sticking to what you know already.

• Company stock options package
• Company part-funded private health insurance and eye care allowance
• Life insurance (3 times base salary)
• Meal tickets – 40 RON per working day
• 25 days of paid vacation time in addition to national holidays, plus the option to buy a further 5 days annual leave
• Learning and development allowance of 1,730 RON annually
• 274 RON gross monthly wellness allowance, or the option to swap the wellness allowance for a 7Card subscription
• Employee Assistance Programme – 24/7 helpline for your wellbeing
• Hybrid way of working – we're all in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Early Finish Fridays – log off at 3 PM on a Friday if you have completed your tasks by then
• Our own office space with a great working environment
• You will love what you do – waking up every day solving one of the biggest social problems of our generation – food waste
• Committed team members with broad experience who share a common passion to build a world class business