About Us
Birketts is a full service, UK Top 50 law firm. With a heritage spanning 160 years, we have more than 700 lawyers and legal professionals based in Bristol, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Ipswich, London, Norwich and Sevenoaks. We advise businesses, government and public sector organisations and individuals in the UK and internationally across four principal practice groups: Real Estate, Corporate Services, Dispute Resolution and Private Client.
We are defined by our Next Level Law proposition. We work with our clients as a proactive partner, horizon scanning and thinking ahead to the changes, challenges or opportunities that they may face.
Next Level Law is also applied to our people. Our collegiate culture means everyone is encouraged to achieve their next level in everything they do. RollOnFriday recently ranked us as the 6th best law firm to work at in 2026.
With our ambition to succeed, comes a strong desire to make a positive contribution to the communities we serve, and we are committed to delivering the objectives set out in our ESG strategy. Diversity plays an integral part in all that we do, with female partners comprising 42% of our partnership.
The team you will join
You will work in partnership with the Product Development Team Leader to agree and evolve delivery system standards and priorities, ensuring the delivery system supports squad throughput and quality while maintaining appropriate control.
Note: There is no on-call requirement at present. The role is expected to define and improve incident response and operational readiness processes; any future on-call rota would be introduced by agreement as the function matures.
The work you will be doing
The Lead Dev Ops Engineer is accountable for the Azure platform, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and the delivery system (CI/CD standards, templates and controls) that enables Birketts squads to deliver to Azure quickly, safely and consistently.
You will establish and maintain the "one right way" of working for Azure environments: guardrails, governance, repeatability and operational readiness. You will work closely with Product development leadership, security and infrastructure stakeholders to ensure standards are adopted through tooling (Azure Policy and Azure DevOps), not documentation alone.
Platform ownership, governance and control
Own subscription and landing zone hygiene, including remediation of legacy resources outside the agreed model
Define and enforce platform governance standards: naming conventions, tagging schema, Azure Policy baseline and controlled exception handling
Define and maintain identity and access patterns (RBAC and, where applicable, PIM) and platform security guardrails in collaboration with security and relevant stakeholders
Improve platform cost governance by ensuring ownership and tagging discipline supports accurate reporting and accountability
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and integrity
Establish and maintain Terraform as the authoritative mechanism for platform and environment provisioning and change control
Design and maintain reusable IaC modules/patterns; implement safe change practices (review, validation, controlled applies)
Reduce drift and improve environment repeatability across dev/QA/prod
Delivery system (CI/CD) ownership and standardisation
Define and evolve delivery system standards in partnership with the Product Development Team Leader, and enforce them through Azure DevOps templates, policies and required checks
Own and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD standards, pipeline templates, approvals/gates, and environment promotion model
Provide "golden path" templates and patterns for application-level and data-level delivery (including Azure resources) so squads can deliver without bespoke pipeline design per product
Embed automated quality controls and security scanning into pipelines (e.g., SAST/SCA) and define secure secret-handling patterns aligned to Birketts expectations
Implement and enforce PR/branch policies and release controls to reduce variability and operational risk
Platform observability and operational readiness
Provide and evolve platform observability foundations: monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and alerting (using the agreed toolset)
Define and improve incident response and operational readiness expectations (runbooks, escalation paths, recovery/rollback patterns, environment health checks)
Establish and maintain DR and operational processes for the platform and environments, with clear escalation to development squads where required
Ways of working, coaching and continuous improvement
Maintain a visible platform backlog and roadmap (stabilisation, governance, standardisation, developer experience)
Coach squads in using the delivery system effectively (templates, PR discipline, gated releases, environment promotion)
Support capability building for internal engineers (including infrastructure engineers where willing) using pairing and staged responsibility ("gated autonomy")
Create and maintain platform documentation: handbook, onboarding guides, decision records and runbooks to reduce key-person dependency
Assess DevOps capacity and resilience needs over time and provide recommendations for scaling the function as workload/support requirements mature
Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested.
What we are looking for
This role is well suited to someone who:
Has owned or led DevOps / platform engineering capability in Azure and can balance delivery speed with governance and risk control
Enjoys creating standards and guardrails that enable teams rather than slow them down
Can operate effectively in an environment with mixed maturity, coaching teams while maintaining safe operational practices
Essential Knowledge & Experience
Proven, hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating Azure infrastructure (subscriptions, governance, identity/access, and core platform services)
Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience, ideally Terraform (module/pattern design, environment patterns, safe change practices)
Strong CI/CD engineering experience, ideally Azure DevOps (templating, approvals/gates, environment promotion strategies, required checks)
Working understanding of security practices in cloud delivery (least privilege/IAM, secrets handling, secure pipeline patterns)
Practical understanding of observability and operational readiness (logs/metrics/tracing concepts; dashboards/alerts; runbooks)
Strong communication skills and ability to explain standards/guardrails in business-impact terms
Desirable
Experience implementing Azure Policy at scale and moving controls from audit to enforcement
Container and orchestration experience (Docker/Kubernetes/AKS) if relevant to platform direction
Familiarity with platform engineering / SRE practices (incident review discipline, reliability measures, operational readiness)
Experience of cost governance and showback/chargeback readiness
Hybrid Working
Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. This role attracts a split of 60% office days and 40% working from home days per week.
Benefits
As a Birkett colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits:
25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays
Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service
Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed)
Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee)
Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme
Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share)
Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance
Paid CSR Day
Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave
Subsidised gym membership
Electric car scheme
Dress for your Day Policy
You can find out more on our website:
Inclusivity and Culture
At Birketts, our culture is driven by ambition and a commitment to positively impact all the communities we serve. We are dedicated to the success, development, and wellbeing of our colleagues, helping them achieve their goals and seize the opportunities that come with our growth.
Birketts is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our policy is unequivocal: we do not tolerate discrimination based on age, disability, sex, race, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, or sexual orientation.
We pride ourselves on being an inclusive organisation that actively promotes equality of opportunity for all, valuing the right mix of talent, skills, and potential. We welcome applications from a diverse range of candidates, and selection for roles is based solely on individual merit.