Lead DevOps Engineer in Leeds

Netcompany is one of Europe’s leading technology partners, with more than 9,500 colleagues delivering digital solutions for governments, critical industries and businesses across Europe. We take responsibility for the full journey, from strategy and development to daily operations. As Europe’s leader in sovereign AI, we build technology on Europe’s own terms. In the United Kingdom, you will join colleagues across our offices in London, Leeds, and Birmingham.

Lead the platform engineering function for a major UK client, owning the technical direction, delivery and reliability of a critical cloud platform. You will shape the multi-year roadmap, mentor a team of engineers, and act as the senior technical point of contact. You will lead a team responsible for designing, building and operating a large-scale AWS platform, working closely with the customer and internal delivery teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and develop the platform engineering team, covering resourcing, recruitment, performance management and on-call rota design.
• Own the platform across all environments, setting the multi-year technical direction and roadmap, including Kubernetes and service mesh upgrades, lifecycle management and architectural improvements.
• Design, build and operate AWS infrastructure as code using Terraform, and run modern container platforms including Amazon EKS, Karpenter, Istio and GitOps-based deployment.
• Own the reliability and performance of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, Argo CD), ensuring fast, secure, repeatable releases with automated testing, quality gates and rollback.
• Drive platform availability, resilience and disaster recovery, including backup and restore testing, failover and incident response leadership, supported by observability and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, CloudWatch).
• Manage external SOC providers and be accountable for technical security and compliance, including vulnerability management, patching, penetration test remediation, access control and secrets management.
• Lead FinOps and cost optimisation, covering budgets, tagging, reporting, right-sizing, non-production scheduling and commitment-based savings.
• Act as the senior technical point of contact for the customer, presenting designs, risks, incidents, cost and roadmap, while working with product, delivery and architecture teams on release planning and capacity forecasting.

Qualifications

• Deep experience leading platform or DevOps engineering teams and a strong track record of delivering reliable, secure cloud platforms.
• Deep expertise in AWS infrastructure as code using Terraform, with hands-on experience across networking, compute, data, security and edge services.
• Experience running modern container platforms, including Amazon EKS, Karpenter, Istio and GitOps-based deployment.
• Ability to own the reliability and performance of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, Argo CD), with a focus on automated testing, quality gates and rollback.
• Strong leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, managing performance and designing on-call rotas.
• Experience managing external SOC providers and leading FinOps and cost optimisation initiatives.
• Hold one of the following AWS certifications as a minimum: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate.

Additional Information

Your development continues through the responsibility you take, the projects you lead and the people you learn from. As part of a structured career model, you’ll build on the experience you already bring, supported by a personal mentor from the leadership group who can help guide your professional development, career direction and personal goals. Through this dialogue, you will gain insight into business areas, responsibilities and opportunities that match your ambitions. You’ll also take part in Netcompany Academy, with courses and seminars tailored to your career stage.

Community is built through the way we work together. You’ll join teams where collaboration, trust and support are part of everyday work. We bring together colleagues with different backgrounds, identities, cultures and experiences, ensuring everyone is met with respect and has equal opportunities to develop and thrive. You’ll collaborate with colleagues across countries, disciplines and business areas, sharing knowledge and solving complex challenges together.

Benefits include

• Hybrid working model with some flexible working.
• 25 days’ holiday.
• Private Medical Health care via Vitality.
• Pension contribution, Life Assurance.
• Professional certifications supported as part of learning and development.
• A range of retail discounts to enhance your lifestyle, encompassing restaurants, supermarkets, travel, leisure activities and health and well-being services.
• Access to our Employee Resource Groups, our groups represent diverse backgrounds and provide a platform for colleagues to connect, learn, and support one another.

Netcompany is committed to providing an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment process for anyone wishing to apply for a job with us. We operate a Disability Confident Interview Scheme which means that we offer guaranteed interviews to all applicants with a disability who meet the minimum criteria for a role. Applicants are asked to opt in, so please let us know if you wish your application to be considered under this scheme. If you need any reasonable adjustments or extra support during the recruitment process, please contact us.