DevOps Principal/ Transformation Lead

DevOps Principal/ Transformation Lead

About the Role

We’re looking for a DevOps Principal to lead the next phase of our DevOps transformation. You’ll drive the development, evolution, and operational excellence of our DevOps practice across internal teams and partners. You’ll be instrumental in shaping a high-performing DevOps culture across a development community of around 100 developers, spanning four business units in the UK and India.

This role requires strong stakeholder management, coaching, and influencing skills to inspire a development and change community. You’ll be equally comfortable engaging senior stakeholders and diving deep into technical discussions on modern DevOps tooling and practices. We foster a ‘one team’ culture, and you’ll play a key role in nurturing a positive, collaborative environment that recognises talent and drives success.

You’ll also bring expertise in secure coding, vulnerability management, and technical debt reduction—helping to safeguard our data and reduce risk.

Familiarity with delivery methodologies such as SAFe and Scrum is essential, as is experience in agile delivery, test automation, code quality, and deployment strategies. An understanding of operational DevOps concepts like observability and site reliability engineering is also important.

We offer hybrid working; however your presence will be required in our Bournemouth, Exeter or Hitchin office.

About You
We’re looking for someone with:
•Proven leadership in DevOps strategy and transformation
•Hands-on experience in a DevOps team environment
•Deep knowledge of pipeline tooling (e.g. Azure DevOps, GitHub, Selenium, JFrog Artifactory, Jenkins)
•Strong understanding of test automation, observability, SRE, and cloud engineering
•Experience setting and managing development standards
•A track record of working with enterprise-level change and excellent stakeholder engagement
•The ability to influence at all levels
•Previous leadership or management experience
•Agile experience (SAFe and Scrum preferred)
•Willingness to work in a hybrid model, with occasional international travel (including to our main partner in India)
•Experience of software development preferred.
Key Responsibilities
•Establish a DevOps Centre of Excellence within the CTO function
•Define and maintain the DevOps strategy and roadmap aligned to the IT strategy
•Provide thought leadership on tooling and automation across LV= and partners
•Drive a unified CI/CD framework focused on speed, quality, and transparency
•Set and enforce development and QA standards
•Define and track metrics for delivery speed, quality, and compliance
•Collaborate with teams to troubleshoot issues and drive continuous improvement
•Partner with business and change teams to address quality and technical debt
•Champion DevOps best practices across all teams
•Pilot and promote new technologies to improve efficiency and quality
•Line manage and mentor a small team of specialists
•Manage third-party DevOps service providers

Rewards & Benefits

This role is a Band C in the LV= Structure.
At LV= Life and Pensions, you’ll go above and beyond to do the right thing for our customers. We’ll reward your hard work with an attractive, competitive salary and benefits package, which includes:
·30 days\’ holiday, with the option to buy up to 2 additional days
·Competitive pension scheme – LV= Life and Pensions will double-match the amount you pay, up to 14%
·An annual bonus scheme based on company and personal performance
·Single-cover private medical insurance (with the option for you to upgrade to family cover)
·Flexible benefits, including a cycle to work scheme, personal accident insurance, critical illness cover and dental insurance
·Up to 20% discount on our life products for you and your immediate family
·A group life assurance policy with 4 x your basic pay to go to your dependents (you’ll have the option to increase to 8 x cover)
·Group Income Protection (if you become a member of the Pension scheme and reach 5 years of service)
·Access to our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for support when you need it
·A virtual GP service
·Shared parental leave.

We’re proud of our inclusive culture at LV= and, as an equal-opportunity employer, we continually work to remove unconscious bias from our recruitment process. We value our colleagues for what they bring to our team regardless of any protected status or characteristics they may have. Talk to us about flexible working as part of your application; if it’s right for you, our members and customers, and our business, then we’ll do everything we can to make it happen.

Please note that we are unable to offer Skilled Worker Visa Sponsorship for this role. Therefore, you must ensure that you are eligible to work in the UK without our sponsorship in order for your application to be considered.