Development & Operations Manager Sovereign AI Defence
Location:North West England (Manchester / Liverpool corridor hybrid, UK citizenship required)
Salary:Up to£70,000+ pension + security clearance support
Type:Permanent, full-time
Sector:Defence Artificial Intelligence Cloud Infrastructure
Reports to:Head of Engineering / CTO
About the Company:
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My client is a UK sovereign AI company developingsecure, mission-critical artificial intelligence and data platformsfor defence, national security, and strategic industry partners.
Our systems operate at the intersection ofreal-time data, autonomous decision support, and cloud-native infrastructure, with a strong emphasis onsecurity, integrity, and performance.
Were scaling rapidly and seeking ahands-on Development & Operations Managerto lead the delivery and uptime of our AI cloud systems across AWS.
AsDevelopment & Operations Manager, youll bridges oftware engineering,DevOps, andcloud operations, ensuring secure, compliant, and high-availability environments for our AI workloads.
Youll lead a small cross-functional team, manage deployment pipelines, automate processes, and enforce defence-grade reliability and observability standards.
Key Responsibilities
* Lead and managea small team (developers + DevOps engineers) delivering secure, scalable, and high-availability AI systems.
* OwnAWS-based infrastructure: Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation/Terraform, CloudWatch, and VPC security.
* OverseeJSON-based API integrations, data pipelines, and serverless event-driven architectures.
* Implementcontinuous integration and deployment (CI/CD)pipelines for code, models, and infrastructure.
* EnsureDevSecOps best practices patching, logging, monitoring, and compliance with UK MoD or ISO27001 frameworks.
* Manageincident response, uptime SLAs, and operational dashboards.
* Collaborate with software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists to optimise cloud performance.
* Maintain documentation and enforcesecure coding and deployment standards.
* Support accreditation, audits, and readiness forUK sovereign hosting environments(IL2IL5).
* Report directly to the Head of Engineering / CTO on delivery metrics, operational risks, and team performance.
Required Skills & Experience
* Strong experience managingAWSenvironments Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation, IAM, CloudWatch.
* Hands-on withPython,JSON, andserverless architectures.
* Deep understanding ofCI/CD(GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline).
* Proven ability tosecure and scaleproduction systems.
* Monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
* Familiar withdata exchange formats (JSON, YAML, Parquet)and API design.
Leadership & Delivery
* 48 years insoftware development and/or DevOps, including 2+ in amanagement or team leadrole.
* Experience indefence, aerospace, or regulated sectorspreferred.
* Strong communicator with ability to translate technical ops into business risk and vice versa.
* Comfortable managingmulti-disciplinary teams(developers, data, infra).
* Passion forsecure AI infrastructureandUK sovereignty in technology.
Security & Eligibility
* UK citizenship required
* Must be eligible to work in the UK without restrictions.
* Understanding ofdata classification and handling protocolsdesirable.
We Offer
* Up to£70,000base salary + bens
Ideal Backgrounds
* DevOps or Engineering Manager indefence,cybersecurity, orAI infrastructurestartup
* Cloud Infrastructure Lead withinAWS PartnerorSaaS provider
* Senior DevOps/Software Engineer ready to take on team management and delivery ownership
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