Engineering Lab Infrastructure Lead
Molten Ventures is a British venture capital firm investing in high-growth European technology companies. It backs founders from Series A and beyond with capital, expertise, networks, and long-term support.
About Molten Ventures
Molten Ventures invests in ambitious European technology companies across areas including fintech, AI, climate, quantum, infrastructure, enterprise software, consumer applications, semiconductors, and hardware. It typically invests £2 million to £50 million at Series A or B, supporting companies with product-market fit and commercial traction. The organization also operates investment products including Molten Ventures PLC, Molten Ventures EIS, and Molten Ventures VCT, and provides portfolio engagement and sustainability support.
Skills
About the Role
You will lead the Engineering Lab Support function, ensuring labs, infrastructure and services remain reliable, scalable and effective for engineers developing next-generation technologies. You will work directly with engineering teams, supporting lab environments, managing infrastructure, automating workflows and solving complex technical problems. You will manage Linux-based servers and engineering environments, support hardware bring-up, validation and testing, and maintain network, storage and compute infrastructure. You will design and improve operational processes, tooling and automation, manage infrastructure through configuration management and Infrastructure-as-Code practices, and develop knowledge bases, documentation and operational standards. As the function grows, you will recruit, mentor and lead a small team of Lab Infrastructure Engineers.
Requirements
- Strong Linux systems administration experience across Debian and/or Red Hat environments
- Experience supporting engineering, research, laboratory, HPC or data-centre environments
- Solid networking knowledge including routing, VLANs, VPNs and troubleshooting complex connectivity issues
- Experience managing physical infrastructure including servers, rack-mounted equipment, BMCs, firmware and out-of-band management
- Experience with configuration management and automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet or similar
- Familiarity with authentication and access-management systems such as LDAP, RADIUS or Active Directory integrations
- Strong troubleshooting skills with a structured and methodical approach to problem solving
- Excellent communication skills and a customer-focused mindset
- Container technologies such as Docker, containerd or Kubernetes
- Monitoring and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix, OpenTelemetry or similar
- Python scripting and automation
- CI/CD tooling including GitLab or GitHub Actions
- Experience supporting hardware development, silicon validation, embedded systems or electronics laboratories
- Performance analysis and troubleshooting across compute, storage and network infrastructure
- Web infrastructure technologies including NGINX, HAProxy or load balancing platforms
Responsibilities
- Lead the development of Engineering Lab infrastructure and support services
- Act as the technical escalation point for complex infrastructure and lab issues
- Manage Linux-based servers and engineering environments
- Support hardware bring-up, validation and testing activities
- Design and improve operational processes, tooling and automation
- Maintain and improve network, storage and compute infrastructure within engineering labs
- Manage infrastructure through configuration management and Infrastructure-as-Code practices
- Build strong relationships with engineering teams and understand their evolving requirements
- Develop knowledge bases, documentation and operational standards
- Recruit, mentor and lead a small team of Lab Infrastructure Engineers as the function grows
