Lead DevOps Engineer

Job Description

About the Role

Reporting to the Head of DevOps, you'll provide technical leadership across cloud infrastructure, platform engineering and automation while staying hands-on in delivery. The Head of DevOps owns the overall function and people leadership across our UK and Pune capabilities. You'll be the senior technical leader, working alongside the engineers.

You won't lead from the sidelines. You'll be in the infrastructure, pipelines and code alongside the team, shaping our DevOps practice and turning good engineering principles into solutions that work in production.

You'll design and evolve secure, scalable and cost-effective infrastructure, keeping our platforms reliable, observable and efficient. Working with engineering, security and product teams, you'll take difficult technical challenges from design through to a stable production outcome.

If you want real technical depth with genuine leadership, where you can set direction and still know what's happening under the hood, this is built for you.

What You'll Do

• Own our AWS and Azure infrastructure. You'll set practical standards for security, reliability, scalability, performance, compliance, cost and resource use, working with architects, developers, security and product teams to ensure they work in the real world.
• Write and maintain the Terraform that runs our infrastructure. Build reusable modules, manage state and environments, and keep documentation up to date. Use the consoles to diagnose problems, but make lasting changes through code, review and controlled deployment.
• Get hands-on with our CircleCI pipelines, creating standards practical enough to be adopted, not simply written down. Embed secret detection, dependency and container scanning, software bills of materials, code-quality checks and supply-chain controls, then help teams fix the risks that matter.
• Run our production Kubernetes platforms day-to-day, working directly with Argo CD, Helm and container tooling to deploy, upgrade, optimise and troubleshoot.
• Keep a close eye on availability, performance and resource consumption. Improve metrics, logs, dashboards and alerts so the team can spot trouble coming. When something goes wrong, lead the technical response, root-cause analysis and preventative actions.
• Ensure we can recover as effectively as we can run. Help maintain and test our backup, resilience and disaster-recovery arrangements, using Python or Bash to remove repetitive work and improve consistency.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, code reviews and hands-on problem-solving. Spread knowledge, share responsibility and avoid creating reliance on a single person.
• Stay curious. Run technical spikes and bring evidence when you think we should change direction. Be the practical bridge between engineering, security, product and the wider business, grounded in what you're building and running.

What We're Looking For

•  You've run production cloud infrastructure in practice, with deep expertise in AWS or Azure and confidence in the other. You're comfortable in the console and in the code, and you understand networking, identity, security controls and governance.
• You've built reusable Terraform module catalogues, managed remote state, and supported multiple environments, accounts, or subscriptions through reviewed and controlled changes.
•  Your Kubernetes experience is production-focused: deployments, upgrades, troubleshooting, and capacity and performance. You've used Helm and GitOps day-to-day, with direct Argo CD experience strongly preferred.
• You've designed CI/CD pipelines from scratch and implemented DevSecOps controls yourself, including secrets detection, dependency and container scanning, SBOM generation, and software supply-chain security.
•  You use Python or Bash regularly and can demonstrate tooling you've developed and maintained. You understand observability, incident response, root-cause analysis and production reliability.
•  You've helped engineers grow through collaboration and shared problem-solving. You lead by example and clearly explain technical risks, options and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Desirable Experience

• Terragrunt.
• CircleCI.
• Cloud cost optimisation and FinOps practices.
• Designing and testing backup, resilience and disaster-recovery solutions.
• Working within a geographically distributed engineering team.

Qualifications

Additional Information

We pride ourselves in offering an excellent benefits package, including an above average pension scheme. When you join the team at NEC Software Solutions, you are provided with the following:

• Private Medical Cover funded by NEC for Employees (with the option to add family members at an additional cost) 
• 25 days paid holiday with the option to buy/sell (FTE)
• 4 x basic salary life assurance cover funded by NEC (with the option to increase cover at an additional cost)
• A Group Pension Plan with fantastic employer contributions up to a maximum of 8.5%
• A selection of flexible benefits to suit your individual needs
• All colleagues get free access to LinkedIn Learning. Over 15000 courses covering a huge breadth of subjects. Learn about what you like, when you like, how you like. 

OTHER INFORMATION

• Candidates must be able to demonstrate a pre-existing right to work and travel within the UK. Documentary evidence will be required.
• All offers are subject to satisfactory vetting, references and occupational health checks. 
• Depending on the nature of the role a Disclosure Barring Service (DBS) check may also be required.

NEC Software Solutions is an equal opportunities employer, welcoming applications from all communities. If you require any reasonable adjustments or have specific accessibility needs during the recruitment or interview process, please feel free to share these with us. We are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accommodating experience for all candidates.

Who We Are:

We’re NEC Software Solutions (part of global tech giant NEC Corporation). While you read this ad, our software is helping to dispatch ambulances, support families, keep trains on the move, locate missing people and even test the hearing of newborn babies.

Working with us, you’ll be helping our 3,000+ employees push the boundaries of what’s possible and support amazing public services.

We work with governments, hospitals, police forces, housing providers, local authorities and more. We help them pay financial support faster, speed up treatments for patients and respond to emergencies in the right way. The more we do, the more our customers can do for others. And together, we make a world of difference.

We’d love your help. And we’ll support you all the way