Operations Engineering Lead

Overview

In this role you will lead the platform, tooling and operations that keep engineering teams shipping safely at scale. You’ll shape shared infrastructure strategy, oversee production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines and observability, and mentor a team of 5–7 engineers. You’ll partner with product, security and business stakeholders to deliver reliable, compliant infrastructure while improving delivery practices. This is an opportunity to influence how engineering operates across a regulated, fast-growing environment and drive cost-conscious, secure platform excellence.

Pay / Benefits

• 25 days annual leave
• private healthcare
• pension with company match up to 10%
• hybrid working
• volunteer day
• share scheme

Responsibilities

• Drive cross-team infrastructure and platform initiatives with resource coordination and blockers removal
• Define and communicate DevOps and infrastructure strategy, including governance interfaces with product and platform teams
• Ensure alignment with business and regulatory goals, fostering knowledge sharing across engineering leads
• Build strong relationships with product, engineering, security and business stakeholders
• Improve delivery processes and engineering practices for infrastructure and operations (CI/CD, release governance, incident response, operational readiness)
• Manage priorities, technical debt, security obligations and day-to-day operations within the team
• Foster collaboration and alignment on shared platform work
• Lead deployment pipelines and system reliability for monorepos and legacy platforms (CircleCI, NX, Docker)
• Guide AWS cloud strategy for hosting, networking, scale, performance, cost-efficiency
• Oversee Infrastructure as Code practices (Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation) ensuring consistency, auditability and security
• Shape monitoring, observability and alerting (Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana) to detect issues early
• Lead incident management (on-call, triage, post-incident reviews, runbooks) and promote security best practices (IAM, WAF, encryption, VPC)
• Support capacity planning, cost optimisation and production readiness for high-risk changes
• Coach and mentor Operations Engineers; stay hands-on when needed; enhance developer experience through tooling, docs and onboarding
• Contribute to hiring and raising the bar for future Operations Engineers

Key requirements

• Technical depth in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and operational systems
• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines and business needs
• Experience championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality and stability
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels
• Effective line management and mentoring capability
• Strategic and tactical decision-making abilities
• Commitment to an empowering, customer-focused engineering culture
• Experience with FinOps and cost monitoring/optimisation

• Stakeholder management
• Communication
• Mentoring and coaching
• AWS infrastructure (cost optimisation, performance, troubleshooting)
• Infrastructure as Code (OpenTofu, Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Observability tooling (Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana)

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