Senior Devops Engineer in Richmond

Lead the evolution of tails.com’s AWS platform - design scalable, secure, resilient systems & turn complexity into clear, modern patterns.

As a certified B Corp, being a responsible business is built into how we work – upholding high social and environmental standards to create better walkies for generations to come.

We want to reshape our cloud platform so it is intentionally designed for where the business is heading - scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective by design rather than by accumulation. This is where you come in.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will help lead that evolution from within the platform. You will take a critical, system-level view of our AWS environment, its architecture, deployment model, resilience patterns, observability, security guardrails, and cost structure, and help define what good looks like for the next phase of tails.com.

This is not about incremental patching or maintaining the status quo. It is about applying sound engineering judgement to decide what should be retained, what should be simplified, and what should be redesigned. You will help turn accumulated complexity into clear, repeatable platform patterns that enable engineering teams to move quickly and safely.

You will work closely with our engineering teams to ensure services are designed for operability and scale from the outset, and with the tails.com security function to embed secure-by-default principles and strengthen resilience and detection capabilities across the platform.

This role is suited to a senior engineer who enjoys reducing systemic complexity, shaping architecture through influence rather than authority, and remaining hands-on while improving the foundations beneath a growing product organisation.

Key Responsibilities:

• Cloud & Platform Engineering
• Own and evolve the AWS platform architecture for scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
• Lead architectural redesign where systems show strain or fragility.
• Establish reusable infrastructure patterns that reduce drift and technical debt.
• Improve operational maturity through strong observability and reliability practices.
• DevOps & Automation
• Design release strategies that keep production changes safe and predictable.
• Eliminate manual processes through automation across the platform.
• Turn incidents into architectural improvements through effective remediation.
• Improve developer experience by making the right way the easy way.
• Security, Guardrails & Resilience
• Embed secure-by-default principles into platform architecture and delivery pipelines.
• Strengthen cloud identity boundaries, isolation, and defence-in-depth.
• Partner with the tails.com security team to evolve resilience, monitoring, and threat detection capabilities.
• Ensure backup, recovery, and failure-domain strategies are deliberate, tested, and robust.
• Collaboration & Technical Influence
• Engage early in service design to ensure reliability, scalability, and security are built in.
• Challenge designs that introduce risk or unnecessary complexity.
• Contribute to platform standards and reference architectures.
• Raise engineering standards through example, peer review, and pragmatic mentorship.

Skills & Qualifications:

• Significant experience building and evolving AWS cloud platforms in production.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resilience, and operational risk.
• Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation.
• Experience designing safe, reliable deployment and release strategies.
• Strong grasp of cloud security fundamentals and secure-by-default architecture.
• Experience working with security teams to strengthen resilience and detection capabilities.
• Solid scripting and automation capability.
• Clear communicator, able to translate technical risk into pragmatic improvements.

Key Attributes:

• Platform-minded and systems-oriented.
• Reliability-focused and comfortable designing for failure.
• Security-aware and pragmatic.
• Influential through technical credibility rather than authority.
• Calm under pressure and outcome-driven.

A few of our core benefits include:

• Private Healthcare through Aviva
• A 9 day fortnight - our office is closed every other Friday!
• 25 days of Annual Leave and 8 additional remote working days

If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an under-represented demographic.

We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com.