Head of DevOps and Platform Automation

Overview

In this leadership role, you own the DevOps and automation agenda across multi-tenant cloud platforms, shaping strategy and delivering transformation at enterprise scale. You’ll lead distributed DevOps and tooling teams, drive CI/CD maturity, and ensure resilient, compliant platforms. You will collaborate with IT, business and architecture stakeholders to align tooling with strategic goals while optimizing cost and performance. This is a high-impact role that combines hands-on governance with strategic delivery to enable major cloud and transformation programmes.

Pay / Benefits

• bonus
• hybrid work model
• London location

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the DevOps, CI/CD and automation strategy and roadmap across tooling and platform services
• Lead and develop a distributed DevOps and tooling team across UK and offshore locations
• Oversee end-to-end platform lifecycle management ensuring availability, resilience, security and compliance
• Drive standardisation and optimisation of CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks and DevOps practices
• Manage BAU performance, incident escalation and service reliability for critical DevOps platforms
• Oversee delivery of DevOps and tooling elements within major transformation programmes and cloud initiatives
• Act as a key stakeholder interface across IT, business and architecture teams to align tooling capability with objectives
• Manage third-party vendors and suppliers, ensuring SLA adherence and cost effectiveness
• Own budget management, resource planning and FinOps activity
• Ensure compliance with governance, security and regulatory standards across all DevOps and tooling operations
• Champion automation, innovation and continuous improvement with modern cloud technologies

Key requirements

• 10+ years in DevOps, infrastructure, platform engineering or tooling leadership
• Experience leading enterprise-scale DevOps or SRE teams in global or regulated environments
• Deep expertise in CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI) and IaC (Terraform or similar)
• Strong Azure cloud experience, ideally hybrid or multi-cloud
• Proven record of leading cloud-native engineering teams and scaling DevOps maturity
• Excellent stakeholder management and ability to influence senior stakeholders
• Vendor and supplier management with SLA governance
• Operational budgeting and FinOps experience
• Understanding of ITIL, service management, governance, secure cloud operating models
• Experience in matrix organisations and leading virtual, dispersed teams
• Relevant cloud/DevOps or ITIL certifications desirable

• stakeholder management
• leadership
• communication
• Jenkins
• GitLab CI
• Terraform