Lead AWS DevOps Engineer - Managed Services

Hippo Digital is recruiting for a Lead DevOps Engineer to join our growing Managed Services team. This is a client‑facing role; you’ll work across a variety of platforms and cloud‑based solutions to ensure our clients’ environments are robust, scalable and high‑performing. You will work alongside like‑minded, talented engineers, shaping robust, cloud‑native systems that our customers can rely on.

As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping Hippo’s managed services capability, helping to deliver reliable, scalable and secure platforms for our clients. You will work within multi‑disciplinary teams across data, design, product, delivery, analysis and engineering to build and operate digital services that have meaningful impact across organisations and society. We value a pragmatic, outcome‑focused approach, underpinned by strong engineering principles and a commitment to continuous improvement.

You will act as a Lead Consultant, delivering DevOps and platform engineering services to our clients. As a technical leader, you will provide strategic direction and hands‑on expertise across cloud platforms, infrastructure and service operations. You will lead by example within squads and contribute to the wider Hippo engineering community, driving best practices in automation, reliability, and secure‑by‑design delivery across managed services.

Our solutions empower our customers to build and support secure, scalable, and well‑engineered systems. We leverage deep data insights and continuous innovation to deliver awesome platforms that allow our customers to get the most from their digital services. Our Managed Services team are key to supporting the systems we develop on an ongoing basis.

Please note we are looking for candidates who are looking for growth at the Lead level; therefore, the advertised salary band represents the entry point for this level, allowing for clear progression within the role. There is an on‑call requirement as part of our Managed Services Team. All applicants must be willing to be part of the rota.

Requirements of the Role

• Demonstrate technical expertise within the Hippo Managed Services community, ensuring user‑centred and automated solutions are maintained and optimised based on business requirements and best practices.
• Participate in the team’s on‑call rotation to provide out‑of‑hours support for critical systems.
• Operate in a hands‑on environment, supporting various cloud platforms, services, and frameworks.
• Coach and encourage the maintenance of standards in cloud architecture, CI/CD, testing, and platform support.
• Share knowledge with the wider technical community, lead in the recruitment of other Managed Service professionals, and support consultants in their professional development.
• Ensure Hippo’s Managed Services and Engineering communities contribute to the business at a strategic level.

Skills and experience that you need

• Demonstrable experience managing production workloads on AWS.
• Strong experience in monitoring, observability and alerting, using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch or Datadog, with a focus on service health and actionable alerting.
• Experience in maintaining robust pipelines, specifically using GitLab CI/CD or GitHub Actions, including debugging complex pipeline issues.
• Strong experience in the deployment and management of containerised applications.
• Extensive experience maintaining and deploying infrastructure‑as‑code using Terraform.
• Experience in Identity & Access Management, including working with enterprise identity platforms such as Ping Identity.
• Experience working with headless CMS and content platforms such as Contentful.
• Proficiency in languages such as Python and JavaScript.
• Strong stakeholder communication skills, with the ability to translate technical issues into business impact.

What makes us great

As well as a competitive salary which we’re transparent about from the outset, you can also expect a range of benefits:

• Contributory pension scheme (Hippo 6% with employee contributions of 2%)
• 25 days holiday plus UK public holidays
• Perkbox access for a wide range of discounts
• Critical illness cover
• Life assurance and death in service cover
• Volunteer days
• Cycle‑to‑work scheme for the avid cyclists
• Salary sacrifice electric vehicles scheme
• Season ticket loans
• Financial and general wellbeing sessions
• Flexible benefits scheme with options of: private health cover, private dental cover, additional company pension contributions, additional holidays (up to an extra 2 days), wellbeing contribution, charity contributions, tree planting

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Hippo

At Hippo, we’re dedicated to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace that works for everyone. We understand that having a diverse team unlocks our capacity for innovation, creativity and problem solving. Only by building a community of diverse perspectives, cultures and socio‑economic backgrounds can we create an environment where all can contribute and thrive. We actively encourage applications from under‑represented groups including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent and people with disabilities. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process that reflects our workplace culture. We are a registered Disability Confident Employer, Mindful Employer, Endometriosis Friendly Employer and a member of the Armed Forces Covenant. Hippo continually strives to remove barriers, provide accommodations and offer reasonable adjustments to ensure equity throughout our practices.

Hippo locations

We are headquartered in Leeds and have offices across the UK in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London and Bristol. We’re on the lookout for top talent nationwide but you need to be located within reasonable travelling distance from one of our offices which will be your contracted office location. Given the dynamic nature of a consulting business, you may be required to work on‑site at a Hippo office or at an in‑/out‑of‑town client location for a number of days per week (client‑dependent) and therefore candidates will need to be open/flexible to travel. Plus, we offer a generous relocation support package of up to £8k (please ask for terms and conditions) to help make your move a smooth one.