Era4 develops, owns and operates AI infrastructure across the UK, powered by renewable energy. Converting legacy industrial and energy sites into modern data-centre facilities, Era4 is combining brownfield regeneration opportunities with cleaner, efficient, scalable compute capacity for healthcare, research, finance, enterprise, and public-sector organisations
We are seeking a Systems Architect to define, design, and govern the architecture of our Kubernetes-based AI infrastructure. This role is responsible for translating business, customer, and regulatory requirements into scalable platform designs and technical specifications that guide platform engineering and operations teams.
Work closely with Product Managers, Platform Engineers, ML engineers, and leadership to ensure the platform is secure, performant, resilient, and future-proof, enabling AI workloads at national-scale.
This is an opportunity to define the end-to-end architecture of our AI platform, defining how Kubernetes, GPU infrastructure, networking, storage, and automation components integrate into a cohesive system.
This is a design authority role, responsible for:
- Platform blueprints
- Technical standards
- System-level decisions
- Long-term scalability and evolution
Provide clear specifications and boundaries that enable Platform Engineers to build and operate the platform effectively.
Key Responsibilities:
- Platform Architecture & Design Authority:
- Produce high-level and low-level designs (HLDs/LLDs) for platform components.
- Establish reference architectures for multi-tenant AI workloads.
- Specify system and integrations across Kubernetes, IAM, PaaS, Observability and automation, ITSM, Security, Billing – the complete cloud service provider stack.
- Define solutions for multi-tenant SaaS offerings for GPU cloud related offerings.
Scalability, Reliability & Performance:
- Provide inputs for SLOs/SLAs across: Infrastructure, SaaS services, Storage services.
- Architect: Capacity planning (compute + storage), Performance optimisation across workloads.
Essential Experience:
- Proven results designing scaled end to end systems (not just components, or end services).
- An expert of infrastructure, cloud, or platform related Architecture/Engineering.
- Exceptional experience designing Kubernetes and cloud native solutions at scale.
- Commercial aptitude to enable performance, cost, time trade-offs and evolutions.
- Proven experience defining target architectures and technology roadmaps.
- Strong understanding of Infrastructure-as-code, automation, GitOps.
- Experience of Open Source stacks including scale-out storage/object stores (Ceph).
One or more would be an advantage:
- Contribution to open-source projects in the IaaS/PaaS space.
- Experience of building and consuming significant cloud services.
- Commercial success of turning technology into a commercially successful product offering.
- AI/ML System design and consumption practises.
Why Join Era4:
You’ll be joining a mission-driven start-up building critical national infrastructure, where operational excellence directly enables growth. This role offers high visibility with leadership, real autonomy, and the chance to shape how a next-generation company operates at scale.
Diversity & Inclusion:
Era4 is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Skills Required
- Proven results designing scaled end-to-end systems, beyond individual components or services
- Expertise in infrastructure, cloud, or platform architecture and engineering
- Exceptional experience designing Kubernetes and cloud-native solutions at scale
- Commercial aptitude for evaluating performance, cost, time trade-offs, and technology evolution
- Proven experience defining target architectures and technology roadmaps
- Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code, automation, and GitOps
- Experience with open-source stacks, including scale-out storage or object stores such as Ceph
- Contribution to open-source projects in the IaaS or PaaS space
- Experience building and consuming significant cloud services
- Commercial success turning technology into a commercially successful product offering
- AI/ML systems design and consumption practices
What We Do
Carbon3.ai is building the UK’s sovereign AI platform – secure, sustainable, and designed for real-world impact. AI growth demands are creating new challenges and compute power requirements are outpacing supply. At Carbon3.ai, we’re not just providing infrastructure, we’re building the foundations to overcome these challenges. We are an energy business transforming into the UK’s sovereign choice for AI. Vertically integrated from soil to software transforming legacy industrial sites into renewable powered AI data hubs. Designed, owned, and operated by Carbon3.ai, all infrastructure and data processing are located within the UK and fully subject to UK jurisdiction and regulatory oversight. We generate our own off-grid renewable power, providing low-cost, sustainable energy comparable to Nordic levels, making AI workloads both affordable and sustainable. We own 50+ sites across the UK and are rapidly scaling them into AI data centres, enabling high-density, low-latency, sovereign AI deployment at national scale. Whether you're training models, deploying intelligent agents, or building industry-specific solutions, Carbon3.ai accelerates your journey from concept to production. Backed by strategic partnerships with leading brands and robust investment, we’re building the infrastructure to power the UK’s most ambitious AI innovation – ensuring British enterprises can access world-class AI capabilities securely and sustainably.
