Lead DevOps Engineer

Job Description

Department: Infrastructure

Job Title: DevOps Technical Lead

Location: UK / Portugal

Core Responsibilities Platform Architecture & Cloud Engineering

• Own AWS infrastructure architecture (multi-account, secure-by-design).
• Define infrastructure standards (networking, IAM, logging, DR).
• Lead Infrastructure-as-Code strategy (Terraform / CloudFormation).
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and resilience patterns.

CI/CD & Release Automation

• Design and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines.
• Improve deployment reliability and reduce rollback frequency.
• Standardize release processes across teams.
• Implement progressive delivery practices.

Reliability & Observability

• Define SLOs / SLIs with engineering teams.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response maturity.
• Lead post-incident reviews and root cause analysis.
• Drive reduction of operational toil.

Security & Compliance Integration

• Implement secure infrastructure patterns (IAM least privilege).
• Integrate DevSecOps controls into pipelines.
• Support ISO 27001 control evidence automation.
• Reduce vulnerability backlog through automation.

FinOps & Cost Optimization

• Partner with FinOps to optimize cloud spend.
• Improve tagging standards and cost allocation.
• Implement rightsizing and automation policies.
• Contribute to forecasting and reserved instance strategies.

Technical Leadership

• Mentor DevOps engineers.
• Define coding and infrastructure standards.
• Lead architecture reviews.
• Act as escalation point for major incidents.

Required Experience

• 5+ years in DevOps / Cloud Engineering
• 3+ years in technical leadership role
• Strong AWS expertise (VPC, IAM, EC2, RDS, EKS, Lambda)
• Proven Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Terraform preferred)
• CI/CD tooling experience (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
• Observability stack experience (Datadog, Prometheus, ELK, etc.)
• Experience operating production SaaS environments
• Incident management & root cause analysis experience

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in regulated environments (ISO 27001, SOC2)
• Cost optimization experience at scale
• Multi-region cloud environments
• Container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Database operational knowledge (RDS, performance tuning, backups)
• Vendor management exposure

Nice to Have

• AWS certifications
• Experience scaling teams
• Experience in high-growth SaaS