Operations Engineering Lead

London Source: WhatJobs

See advert for pay

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