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.
Significant experience in DevOps, platform or SRE roles, including leading and developing engineering teams.
Expert-level AWS knowledge across compute, networking, data, security and edge services, running large-scale production workloads.
Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production (ideally Amazon EKS), including service mesh, autoscaling and GitOps deployment.
Deep proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and an "everything as code" approach.
Proven experience owning reliable, secure CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Azure DevOps, Argo CD) with automated quality gates.
Strong grounding in observability, incident management, resilience and disaster recovery in a 24/7 service environment.
Working knowledge of security and compliance practices, including vulnerability management and managing external technical providers.
Demonstrated FinOps and cloud cost optimisation experience, balancing cost, performance and resilience.
Excellent communicator, confident presenting to customers, senior stakeholders and technical teams, with the ability to set technical direction over a multi-year period.
A calm, hands-on and credible leader who stays decisive under pressure and drives continuous improvement.
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
Desirable Qualficiations:
Experience working in an ITIL aligned environment.
Terraform or FinOps Practitioner certifications
Experience working in public sector or regulated environments.
Familiarity with ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials Plus.

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

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
Hybrid