Lead DevOps Engineer

Elliptic has helped trace and disrupt over $21.8 billion in illicit crypto laundered across blockchains, from sanctioned nation states to organized crime networks hiding funds through token swaps and unregulated exchanges. It’s how compliance and investigations teams fight back, tracking and screening transactions with 99% market coverage.

The infrastructure behind all of this needs to be as resilient and sharp as the intelligence it delivers. We're looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to own and evolve our DevOps practices. This is a role for someone who combines deep technical ability with a genuine passion for growing the team. You'll lead a team of DevOps engineers while staying close to the technical work, setting direction on infrastructure, automation, and reliability.

The Impact You Will Have

As a Lead DevOps Engineer at Elliptic, you will have a deep impact across the company by championing DevOps, security, and reliability principles. You’ll help build a culture of automation, efficiency, and continuous improvement, empowering teams to deliver secure, high-quality software with confidence. Current major projects include delivering AI Gateway and supporting LangChain/LangGraph infrastructure for Elliptic's AI products, managing disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure, and administering Kubernetes clusters across multi-region AWS environments. You’ll work alongside experienced and passionate engineers who enjoy solving tough challenges and learning from one another. This is a hands‑on team Lead role where you will balance technical expertise with team leadership.

Elliptic is building an AI fluent workforce. Across our Product, Engineering, Design and Intelligence we’re going beyond giving everyone the tools. We’re setting new standards. Using AI to transform how we build and work every day to deliver on our market opportunity. Put another way our teams iterate alongside agentic systems applying judgement to build world class systems.

This role requires 'Transformative' AI fluency. This means you've already made production decisions about how AI systems get built, evaluated, and used responsibly, and you're ready to raise the bar for the engineers around you from day one.

What You Will Do

• Own the DevOps and Platform roadmap, including Kubernetes platform evolution, application packaging and migration to EKS, and enabling engineering teams to ship reliably to production.
• Lead by doing - engineer, review, and enhance Kubernetes and CNCF-aligned infrastructure, setting technical standards.
• Architect multi‑cluster, multi‑region environments using Istio/Linkerd, Cluster API, and Kyverno.
• Build progressive delivery frameworks with Flux and Flagger for GitOps-driven, canary, and automated releases.
• Implement modern provisioning with controllers like Crossplane and ACK for Kubernetes-native cloud integration.
• Define and enforce Zero Trust architecture with Vault, Boundary, service identity, and mTLS‑secured meshes.
• Engineer policy‑driven automation and compliance using OPA, Kyverno, and secure supply chain configurations.
• Establish IaC and GitOps standards, adding automated testing to every infrastructure change.
• Prototype agentic infrastructure components, including deployment and observability platforms in service meshes.
• Contribute to the Kong AI Gateway, including Dataplane deployments, ACM/SSL integration, and observability via DataDog
• Champion DevSecOps maturity by embedding SAST/DAST, chaos engineering, and error budget monitoring.
• Collaborate with Security, Data, and AI teams to shape DevOps and AI platform architectures with regulatory compliance.
• Stay ahead of CNCF and AI ecosystem innovations, from eBPF observability to agent‑aware orchestration.

What We’re Looking For

We value diverse backgrounds and paths to expertise. If you bring solid experience in several of the areas below, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every detail.

Core Expertise

• Experience leading or mentoring engineering teams with the ability to set direction and contribute hands‑on.
• Strong Kubernetes knowledge, including cluster lifecycle management, API extensions, Operators, Helm, and the broader CNCF ecosystem (Cilium, ExternalDNS, Kyverno, Gatekeeper).
• Designing and operating multi‑cluster, multi‑region Kubernetes platforms with service meshes such as Istio, Consul, or Linkerd and policy‑based workload placement.
• Writing Infrastructure‑as‑Code with Terraform on AWS or GCP using modular design, GitOps integration, and automated testing (Terratest, InSpec).
• Implementing GitOps pipelines with ArgoCD or FluxCD for progressive delivery, drift correction, and multi‑environment releases.
• Building containerized, serverless, or event‑driven systems with strong observability using DataDog, Splunk, or OpenTelemetry.
• Strengthening platform security through Vault‑based secret management, least privilege access, and compliance automation.
• Designing CI/CD workflows that include SAST, DAST, policy enforcement, and performance telemetry.
• Improving reliability and resilience through SLOs, error budgets, and chaos engineering.
• Working knowledge of LLM‑based services and AI infrastructure. You don't need to be an ML engineer, but you should be comfortable deploying, securing, and operating AI Gateways and services (e.g. Kong AI Gateway, LangGraph deployments, or similar)

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Are passionate about building secure, scalable, and reliable systems and helping others do the same.
• Have a strong customer and product mindset.
• Take ownership and make thoughtful, data‑informed decisions.
• Enjoy building high‑performing, inclusive, and autonomous teams.
• Align technical leadership with business outcomes.
• Collaborate openly and continuously seek to learn and grow.

Nice to Have

The following are genuinely bonus areas. Great if you have them, but not required.

• Leading platform modernisation or reliability initiatives in scale‑up or regulated environments.
• Experience with Operator development, CRD automation, eBPF, or Cilium for observability.
• Expertise in policy‑as‑code using OPA or Kyverno within secure supply chain or CSPM frameworks.
• Familiarity with MCP and A2A orchestration patterns in Kubernetes service mesh environments.
• Understanding of Agent Gateways and Registries connecting microservices and AI agents.
• Background in secure containers, sandboxing, or confidential computing for regulated workloads.
• Experience with data‑intensive systems such as Spark, Databricks, or Data Mesh.
• Programming experience in Go, Python, or TypeScript.
• Contributions to open‑source or CNCF community projects.

Job Benefits

How we work:

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year
• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space

Learning & Development:

• $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development

Vacation/ Leave:

• Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays
• An extra day for your birthday
• Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully‑paid leave and leave.

Benefits:

• Private Health Insurance - we use Bupa!
• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support
• Life Assurance: we hope you will never need this - but our cover is for 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries
• Cycle to Work Scheme

We know Diversity and Inclusion is much deeper than just hiring, but it’s important for us to mention it here. We welcome and embrace individuals of all backgrounds and identities at Elliptic, and this is an ongoing priority for us. We know incredible people don’t all think in the same way. We want to be challenged every day. We believe our diverse team of individuals underpins this by bringing creative thinking and innovation to Elliptic every day. We are committed to creating a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace, so we welcome applications from everyone, even if you may not think you fit all of the requirements of our roles. We foster an environment of psychological safety, where everyone feels comfortable to bring their whole self to work.

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