Lead DevOps Engineer

Lead the platform engineering function for a major UK client, owning the technical direction, delivery and reliability of a critical cloud platform. You will shape the multi-year roadmap, mentor a team of engineers, and act as the senior technical point of contact.
You will lead a team responsible for designing, building and operating a large-scale AWS platform, working closely with the customer and internal delivery teams.
Key Responsibilities
Lead, mentor and develop the platform engineering team, covering resourcing, recruitment, performance management and on-call rota design.
Own the platform across all environments, setting the multi-year technical direction and roadmap, including Kubernetes and service mesh upgrades, lifecycle management and architectural improvements.
Design, build and operate AWS infrastructure as code using Terraform, and run modern container platforms including Amazon EKS, Karpenter, Istio and GitOps-based deployment.
Own the reliability and performance of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, Argo CD), ensuring fast, secure, repeatable releases with automated testing, quality gates and rollback.
Drive platform availability, resilience and disaster recovery, including backup and restore testing, failover and incident response leadership, supported by observability and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, CloudWatch).
Manage external SOC providers and be accountable for technical security and compliance, including vulnerability management, patching, penetration test remediation, access control and secrets management.
Lead FinOps and cost optimisation, covering budgets, tagging, reporting, right-sizing, non-production scheduling and commitment-based savings.
Act as the senior technical point of contact for the customer, presenting designs, risks, incidents, cost and roadmap, while working with product, delivery and architecture teams on release planning and capacity forecasting.
You bring deep experience leading platform or DevOps engineering teams and a strong track record of delivering reliable, secure cloud platforms.
Have deep expertise in AWS infrastructure as code using Terraform, with hands-on experience across networking, compute, data, security and edge services.
Have experience running modern container platforms, including Amazon EKS, Karpenter, Istio and GitOps-based deployment.
Can own the reliability and performance of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, Argo CD), with a focus on automated testing, quality gates and rollback.
Bring strong leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, managing performance and designing on-call rotas.
Have experience managing external SOC providers and leading FinOps and cost optimisation initiatives.
Hold one of the following AWS certifications as a minimum:
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate.

Skills
AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Automation Testing

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
Hybrid