Lead DevOps Engineer – Azure Platform

Location: Hybrid (60% office / 40% home)

Locations: Ipswich, Norwich, Cambridge, Chelmsford

NOTE: Candidates for the role MUST ALREADY be located in Ipswich, Norwich, Cambridge, Chelmsford or at a commutable distance. Full right to work in the UK- ILR, British passport/citizenship is a MUST.

Contract: Full-time, Permanent

Salary: up to £75,000 Gross/a DOE

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineer to take full ownership of our Azure platform, Infrastructure‐as‐Code standards, and CI/CD delivery systems. This is a pivotal leadership role where you will define the “one right way” of working across our cloud environments, enabling engineering squads to deliver quickly, safely, and consistently.

You will partner closely with the Product Development Team Leader and collaborate with security, infrastructure, and product stakeholders to embed governance through tooling-not documentation alone. This is a role for someone who enjoys setting high standards, improving operational readiness, and raising engineering maturity across an organisation.

This position has no current on-call requirement, though you will contribute to defining future incident response and readiness as the function evolves.

Key Responsibilities

Azure Platform Ownership & Governance

• Own the health and hygiene of Azure subscriptions and landing zones.
• Remediate legacy resources and ensure adherence to the agreed operating model.
• Define and enforce platform governance: naming conventions, tagging schema, Azure Policy baselines, and exceptions handling.
• Establish identity and access management patterns (RBAC, PIM) and security guardrails in partnership with security teams.
• Improve cost governance through consistent tagging and ownership attribution.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Leadership

• Establish Terraform as the authoritative source for environment provisioning and change control.
• Design and maintain reusable Terraform modules and environment patterns.
• Lead safe-change practices including reviews, validation, and controlled apply processes.
• Reduce drift and increase consistency across dev/QA/prod environments.

CI/CD Delivery System Ownership

• Define and evolve Azure DevOps delivery standards with the Product Development Team Leader.
• Own and refine CI/CD templates, policies, approvals, and environment promotion models.
• Deliver “golden path” pipelines enabling squads to ship apps and data projects without bespoke designs.
• Embed automated quality and security checks (SAST, SCA), plus secure secrets management patterns.
• Implement strong PR/branch policies to reduce risk and variability.

Observability & Operational Readiness

• Build and evolve monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting foundations.
• Define and improve incident response processes, runbooks, escalation paths, and recovery/rollback strategies.
• Maintain disaster recovery processes and ensure clear lines of responsibility with development squads.

Ways of Working, Coaching & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain a clear platform backlog and roadmap covering governance, standardisation, and developer experience.
• Coach squads in adopting best practices for CI/CD, PR discipline, environment promotion, and tooling.
• Build capability within engineering teams using pairing, mentoring, and staged autonomy.
• Maintain platform documentation including handbooks, runbooks, and onboarding guides.
• Assess DevOps capacity needs and recommend scaling as the platform evolves.

What We’re Looking For

Essential Experience

• Proven hands-on experience designing and operating Azure infrastructure and governance.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, ideally Terraform (module design, reviews, patterns).
• Solid CI/CD engineering background, ideally with Azure DevOps (templates, gates, approvals).
• Understanding of secure pipeline design, IAM best practices, and secrets management.
• Practical understanding of observability fundamentals and operational readiness.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate standards in business terms.

Desirable

• Experience implementing Azure Policy at scale (audit → enforce).
• Knowledge of containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, AKS).
• Exposure to SRE/platform engineering practices (incident review, reliability).
• Experience with cost governance or showback/chargeback modelling.

Why Join Us?

We are a flexible, people‐centric organisation offering a hybrid work model and a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• 25 days holiday plus Bank Holidays
• Private Healthcare (after probation)
• Scottish Widows Pension (5% employer / 5% employee)
• Staff Profit Share & Performance Bonuses
• Life Assurance – 4x salary
• Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave
• Subsidised Gym Membership
• Electric Car Scheme
• Paid CSR Day
• Dress for Your Day Policy
• Long service holiday awards