Lead DevOps Engineer

Description

Lead DevOps Engineer role on the Workspace platform, which delivers financial data, analytics, news and workflow tools to customers worldwide.

You will join the engineering organisation behind the platform and lead the DevOps, cloud and deployment work that keeps its services running.

This is a senior position that combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You will set engineering standards, shape architecture decisions, push automation and operational quality, and coach engineers across the team.

The work centres on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, scalability, resilience and cost control.

Level: Senior Associate.

Responsibilities

• Lead DevOps, cloud and platform engineering practice for the platform.
• Build and keep improving highly available, scalable and resilient cloud infrastructure and deployment platforms.
• Lead design and running of Kubernetes clusters, covering scheduling, autoscaling, resources, resilience and lifecycle.
• Set and refine container standards, using tools such as Docker.
• Design and maintain infrastructure as code with tools such as Terraform, keeping environments reproducible, secure and easy to maintain.
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines so teams can ship software safely, often and consistently across environments.
• Automate provisioning, deployments, configuration, environment management and operational tasks.
• Set standards for scalability, availability, disaster recovery, resilience and production readiness.
• Help engineering teams improve logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards and alerting.
• Lead work to improve reliability, performance, operational efficiency and cloud spend.
• Spot architectural and operational risks and work with teams on suitable technical fixes.
• Build security into the delivery lifecycle and work with security teams so infrastructure and deployments meet company standards.
• Lead investigations of complex production incidents, find root causes and put lasting preventive fixes in place.
• Work with software engineers, architects, QA, security, SRE and other teams to improve developer and production experience.
• Mentor DevOps and software engineers and encourage knowledge sharing.
• Assess new tools and practices and decide where they would meaningfully help the platform.

Requirements

• A degree in computer science, software engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Significant experience in DevOps, site reliability, platform or cloud infrastructure engineering.
• Proven record running large, business-critical production systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, ideally AWS and/or Azure.
• Deep Kubernetes knowledge, including production operation, scaling, resource management, networking and workload lifecycle.
• Strong experience with Docker and container-based architectures.
• Strong experience with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Extensive experience designing and maintaining modern CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation.
• Solid understanding of cloud networking, identity and access management, infrastructure security and secrets management.
• Deep understanding of cloud patterns for scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, resilience and disaster recovery.
• Experience building observability with metrics, logging, tracing and monitoring tools.
• Strong grasp of production operations, incident management, root cause analysis and reliability practice.
• Experience finding and fixing infrastructure performance and cloud cost issues.
• Ability to analyse complex technical problems, foresee infrastructure challenges and design practical, scalable solutions.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to shape technical decisions across several teams and stakeholders.
• Experience leading technical work, mentoring engineers and setting engineering standards.
• Genuine interest in emerging technologies and in improving engineering practice.
• Desirable: experience supporting large-scale desktop, web or distributed application platforms.
• Desirable: experience with Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or similar managed Kubernetes services.
• Desirable: experience with Kubernetes autoscaling tools such as Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter or Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.
• Desirable: experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk or equivalent.
• Desirable: experience with large distributed systems and microservice architectures.
• Desirable: experience running platforms in a highly regulated or financial services setting.
• Desirable: familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost management.
• Desirable: experience improving developer platforms, developer experience and self-service infrastructure.

Conditions

Part of the role is an on-call rota covering production services during agreed support hours.

Occasional weekend work may be needed for major releases, infrastructure changes or production activities.

The company is an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on any protected basis, and it will make reasonable accommodation for religious practice and for mental health or disability needs.

Benefits

• 25 days of holiday per year plus an extra day off for your birthday.
• Annual wellness allowance.
• Share purchase plan.
• Medical health insurance and preventive medical services.
• Dental cover and life insurance.
• Pillar 3 private pension.
• Meal vouchers and flexible benefits.
• Bookster and volunteering events.
• Colleagues with at least one year's continuous service who become parents get at least 26 weeks' paid leave and may return on a phased basis under company policy.
• Personal development and a broad range of formal and informal learning options.