Head of DevOps

Head of DevOps | Azure, Terraform, CI/CD Leadership | UK Insurer Modernising a 40-Strong DevOps Function

• Salary: £120,000 to £135,000, plus up to 20% annual bonus and a strong corporate benefits package
• Location: London, hybrid (2 to 3 days in the office), plus roughly a day a fortnight at their IT hub in Sussex

You'll run the DevOps and automation function that keeps a UK insurer's technology delivery moving, a team of around 40 people the business treats as its engine room. Three team leads report to you across the UK and India, looking after the DevOps engineers embedded in the development squads, while four automation product owners cover areas like observability and platform engineering. This is a leadership seat, focused on how the team is structured, deployed and grown as the business changes, so your time goes on people, delivery and direction rather than the pipelines themselves.
The company is a long-established UK insurer with thousands of staff, a few years into a serious push on DevOps and automation. Around 70% of the estate is still legacy technology, so there's plenty to modernise. The function supports roughly 300 developers and a test team of about 70, with DevOps engineers currently deployed out to each development team to run their pipelines. It's a regulated environment (FCA), so governance and release reliability count for as much as speed.
They want someone who has led DevOps inside an end-user organisation rather than a career built inside an offshore outsourcer, and who understands DevOps delivered alongside developers, not pure cloud or infrastructure work. If that's you, this is a broad, senior remit at a business that's investing properly in the area.
What They're Looking For:

• Leadership of a sizeable DevOps function spread across the UK and offshore India
• DevOps engineering delivered inside development teams, rather than pure cloud or infrastructure DevOps
• An enterprise or in-house background, not a career built inside an offshore outsourcer
• Azure
• CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Third-party and vendor management
• 10+ years across DevOps and tooling or automation

What You'll Work With:

• Ansible
• Self-service environment provisioning
• PaaS and IaaS platforms
• CI/CD governance and release management
• A large legacy estate part-way through modernisation
• UK and India engineering teams plus offshore delivery partners

Nice to Haves:

• Insurance, banking or other regulated-sector experience
• Azure certifications
• ITIL or Agile certifications
• Experience in large, matrix-managed global organisations

Why Join?
You'll own a 40-person function end to end, with a budget of around £1 to £1.5m and real say over how the operating model develops as the business modernises. The brief is wide: strategy and roadmap, day-to-day delivery, major programme work, vendor management and budget.
If this is your kind of leadership role, apply and I'll call you to talk it through.
Head of DevOps | Azure, Terraform, CI/CD Leadership | UK Insurer Modernising a 40-Strong DevOps Function