Principal DevOps Engineer

Job Title: Principal DevOps Engineer II

Industry: FinTech / Payments Technology

Location: United Kingdom (Fully Remote)

Salary: Up to £125,000 base + 9% bonus

Type: Permanent, Full-time

A rapidly growing global payments technology organisation is looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer II to help define and scale its enterprise DevOps platform. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on architecting and evolving the engineering delivery platform that supports both cloud and on-premise environments.

You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, security teams, and developers to design scalable CI/CD architecture, improve developer experience, and implement platform standards across the organisation. This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact by driving automation, improving delivery performance, and shaping DevOps culture across a modern engineering environment.

The Role:

• Define and own the architecture of the organisation’s engineering delivery platform, covering CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, secrets management, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Lead the migration and implementation of GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Actions, building reusable workflow frameworks and enforcing automated security and quality gates.
• Architect and manage secrets and credential management strategies using HashiCorp Vault.
• Develop and manage artifact repository strategies, including promotion pipelines, vulnerability scanning integration, and multi-language ecosystem support.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code adoption using Terraform and configuration management through Ansible to enable fully automated environments.
• Establish containerisation standards using Docker and Docker Compose to support consistent development and production environments.
• Manage Cloudflare infrastructure including DNS lifecycle automation, WAF rules, and Zero Trust access policies.
• Improve developer experience by building standardised pipeline frameworks that accelerate service delivery and reduce time-to-production.
• Champion self-service and inner-source practices, creating shared tooling, documentation, and pipeline libraries for engineering teams.
• Implement delivery metrics and dashboards to monitor deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and platform performance.
• Provide technical leadership across engineering teams, identifying systemic delivery challenges and implementing scalable solutions.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to raising DevOps standards through technical design reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

Skills Needed:

• 12+ years of hands-on technical experience with strong foundations in software engineering and DevOps practices.
• Proven experience delivering organisation-wide platform initiatives such as CI/CD architecture redesigns or DevOps platform migrations.
• Strong coding ability in a statically typed language such as C# or Java.
• Expert experience with GitHub and GitHub Actions including reusable workflows and automated pipeline frameworks.
• Advanced Terraform expertise including module design, remote state management, and infrastructure policy enforcement.
• Strong experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible.
• Strong experience with HashiCorp Vault for secrets management and security integration.
• Deep containerisation expertise using Docker and modern image optimisation practices.
• Experience managing artifact repositories and CI/CD integration across multiple programming ecosystems.
• Experience delivering infrastructure across cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, or Oracle Cloud) and on-premise environments.
• Strong understanding of DevOps security practices including SAST, dependency scanning, container security, and supply chain security.
• Excellent communication and technical leadership skills.

Benefits

• Fully remote working (UK-based)
• 5 days paid holiday plus bank holidays
• £5,000 annual certification and professional development budget
• £60 per month work-from-home allowance
• Private healthcare
• Additional benefits and performance-based incentives

Research indicates that men will apply to a role when they meet only 50–60% of the requirements, while women and other underrepresented groups often look for a 90–100% match. If this role excites you but you don’t tick every single box, please still apply. We’d love to hear from you.