Lead DevOps Engineer (Azure)
Lead DevOps Engineer (Azure)
£65,000 - £75,000
East Anglia (multiple locations)
Hybrid - 3 days on-site (1 day Ipswich)
REED Technology are working with a client who are recruiting for a hands-on Lead DevOps Engineer to take ownership of an established Azure platform and replace the interim resource. This is the first permanent DevOps hire in the organisation, responsible for stabilising, governing and maturing the Azure environment while setting clear standards for delivery.
This role is suited to someone who has led or owned DevOps / platform capability in Azure, can work independently, and enjoys creating structure, guardrails and repeatable ways of working.
Accountabilities;
Azure platform ownership & governance
* Full ownership of Azure subscriptions, landing zones and platform hygiene
* Defining and enforcing governance standards (Azure Policy, RBAC, naming, tagging)
* Improving platform resilience, cost governance and disaster recovery
Infrastructure as Code
* Establishing Terraform as the single source of truth for infrastructure
* Designing reusable modules and environment patterns
* Reducing configuration drift across dev / test / production
CI/CD & delivery standards
* Ownership of CI/CD standards using Azure DevOps
* Defining pipeline templates, PR/branch policies, approvals and gated releases
* Creating "golden path" delivery patterns so teams can deploy without bespoke pipelines
Operational readiness & observability
* Defining monitoring, logging, alerting and dashboards
* Improving incident response, runbooks and recovery processes
* Shaping DR and operational processes (no on-call at present)
Ways of working & coaching
* Coaching development teams in DevOps best practice
* Standardising ways of working across squads
* Building internal capability and reducing reliance on individuals
Key skills and experience;
* Strong, hands-on experience designing and operating Azure platforms
* Proven Terraform experience (modules, patterns, safe change)
* Strong Azure DevOps CI/CD engineering experience
* Experience implementing governance, security guardrails and delivery controls
* Comfortable operating without an existing DevOps team
Desirable
* Azure Policy at scale
* Observability, SRE or platform engineering practices
* Container / AKS experience
* Cost governance and showback/chargeback experience
Why this role?
* Opportunity to own and shape DevOps from the ground up
* High-impact role with clear responsibility and autonomy
* Initial 3-6 months focused on stabilisation, governance and standardisation
* Exciting transformation phase within IT
If you have the relevant experience for this role and happy to be 2 days on site/week in either Ipswich, Norwich, Chelmsford or Cambridge and 1 day in Ipswich, please apply using the link provided.
This role requires candidates to already hold full right to work in the UK. The client are not able to provide sponsorship now or in the future.