Systems Administrator

At Monumo, we are united by a shared commitment to addressing environmental challenges and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. Together, we are shaping a future where technology meets sustainability. We are combining human ingenuity with deeptech intelligence to deliver more sustainable designs and solve engineering problems impossible by conventional means.

Our methodology opens the door to optimal engineering solutions and disruptive new design ideas, that would be impossible, or at the very least improbable, without this blend of great engineers and compute power.

Our focus, at present, is on the engineering design problem of electric motor; a mature, but increasingly vital technology with plenty of room for improvement. However, the techniques and the creativity employed to solve the engineering and technical problems of improving motor performance can be applied to other challenges. The tools we are creating can be applied to clean energy generation, aviation, heavy industry, manufacturing, robotics… there’s a lot to optimise!

Every effort must be made to solve the climate crisis, to protect the Earth’s resources, reduce the materials we use, increase the efficiency and performance of things we make and reduce their impact. Electric motors account for 50% of worldwide electricity consumption and are a key element in transport decarbonisation. We want Monumo to play a meaningful part in this change.

We are a well-funded start-up based in central Cambridge, UK. Our core team brings together complementary skills and expertise from Arm, Microsoft Research, DeepMind, and academia. We really value everyone’s individual experience and the different perspectives, skills, and humour they bring to our team.

Why we need you

Your role at Monumo will be to maintain internal systems and provide a compute platform to operate our simulation, optimisation, and AI technology at scale. You will work with our engineers to deliver hosted tools to deliver results more effectively. You will also have a significant influence on the choice of deployment technology for our backends, since there are new tools that we’re starting to build. Most of the infrastructure is managed remotely, however, occasional on-site work in our Stevenage data centre and Coventry office is required when physical intervention is necessary.

Our organisation values are designed to guide all that we do. We're looking for people who can believe in and embody these organisation values and can use them to drive forward progress.

Job Description:

Your responsibilities will include

• Maintaining internal compute systems with increasing need for consistent availability, and automation
• Compliance and security of IT systems
• Physically installing server hardware and cabling in data centre
• Supporting HPC / machine learning workloads behind APIs
• Job lifecycle systems (submission, scheduling, retries, cancellation, quotas)
• Driving technical decisions and advocating for best practices in systems (serviceability, security, availability)
• Working closely with other engineers to create hosted software services

What you’ll bring that we will value

We're very open minded about the sort of technical background you come from. Below are some of the skills and motivations we’re looking for in this role.  Don’t worry if you don’t tick all of them! More important is your willingness to grow and learn new things.

Knowledge and skills:

• Linux server management (we use Ubuntu), replication
• Container based deployment (Kubernetes, Podman, Docker)
• Experience with DRBD, Btrfs, Btrbk, NFS, or comparable technologies
• Server networking, VLANs, DNS, firewalls
• Infrastructure as code (e.g. ansible, terraform, salt), and e.g. Python scripting for automation
• Experience operating distributed computing or cluster environments (e.g., Slurm)
• VPNs (we use Wireguard)
• Large data storage (terabytes rather than petabytes)
• Comfort in hardware diagnostics and component replacement (memory, storage, networking)

If you have any of these, that would be great

• Multilayer switching and routing
• Windows and Entra, support of macOS
• Zero trust datacentre, FreeIPA (or equivalents)
• Support of CI/CD pipelines, Git, and deployment workflows
• Python for numerical computing (e.g. numpy)
• Interest in or experience with physics-based simulation
• Interest in or experience with supporting ML/AI systems

You will thrive in our team

If you are motivated by solving real world technical problems through open-minded, interdisciplinary thinking, and by learning new things and technologies that expand your mindset and professional growth.

We value people who like sharing ideas about how we can do things better, who are comfortable balancing autonomy with collaboration across team members from different backgrounds (physics, engineering, operations), and who enjoy working in a dynamic environment.

You will be a strong fit if you feel passionate about developing a purpose-driven business that will make a difference in people's lives.