Our client is a well-established, Top 50 UK professional services organisation with a strong national presence and a long-standing heritage. They support corporate, public sector and private clients across multiple practice areas and are recognised for their collaborative culture and commitment to continuous improvement.
The business operates a modern hybrid working model and places strong emphasis on ESG, diversity, and employee development. They are currently investing heavily in platform maturity, governance and engineering standards as part of their next phase of growth.
The Role
This is a senior, hands‑on Lead DevOps position with ownership of the Azure platform, Infrastructure-as-Code standards, and CI/CD delivery systems.
You will define and embed the “one right way” of working across Azure environments — building guardrails, governance and repeatability into tooling rather than documentation.
There is no on‑call requirement at present. The role will shape incident response and operational readiness processes as the function matures.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Ownership, Governance & Control
* Own Azure subscriptions and landing zone standards
* Define and enforce governance: naming conventions, tagging, Azure Policy baseline, exception handling
* Define identity and access patterns (RBAC, PIM where applicable)
* Improve cost governance and tagging discipline
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
* Establish Terraform as the authoritative provisioning mechanism
* Design and maintain reusable IaC modules and patterns
* Implement safe change practices (review, validation, controlled applies)
CI/CD & Delivery System Ownership
* Define and evolve Azure DevOps standards (templates, policies, required checks)
* Own CI/CD templates, approval gates and environment promotion models
* Create “golden path” delivery templates for application and data workloads
* Embed automated quality and security controls (SAST/SCA, secret handling)
* Enforce PR/branch and release controls
Observability & Operational Readiness
* Own monitoring, logging, dashboards and alerting foundations
* Improve incident response processes and operational readiness
* Define runbooks, escalation paths and rollback patterns
* Establish DR processes and environment health checks
Coaching & Platform Enablement
* Maintain platform backlog and roadmap
* Coach squads on CI/CD and delivery standards
* Support capability development across engineering teams
* Reduce key‑person dependency via documentation and playbooks
* Assess and recommend DevOps scaling as the function grows
What They’re Looking For
This role suits someone who:
* Has led or owned Azure DevOps / Platform Engineering capability
* Balances engineering velocity with governance and risk control
* Enjoys creating guardrails that enable teams rather than restrict them
* Can operate in an environment with mixed platform maturity
* Strong hands‑on Azure platform experience (subscriptions, governance, identity, core services)
* Cloud security fundamentals (least privilege, IAM, secure pipelines, secret handling)
* Observability and operational readiness experience
* Azure Policy implementation at scale
* Containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, AKS)
* Cost governance and showback/chargeback models
Working Model
Hybrid working model – approximately 3 days in office / 2 days remote.
Benefits Package
* 25 days holiday + bank holidays
* Performance bonus & profit share
* Life assurance & permanent health insurance
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