Lead DevOps Engineer

Role Overview

• Own, build, and evolve the DevOps and Platform Engineering roadmap, defining the technical backbone for automation, scaling, and multi‑tenant Kubernetes‑based IDP.
• Lead, by doing, engineering, reviewing, and improving Kubernetes and CNCF‑aligned infrastructure daily, setting the technical benchmark for excellence
• Architect and operate multi‑cluster, multi‑region Kubernetes environments using tooling such as Istio/Linkerd (service mesh federation), Cluster API (lifecycle management), and Kyverno (policy as code).
• Design and deploy progressive delivery frameworks with Flux and Flagger for GitOps‑driven releases, canary and A/B deployments, and automated rollout health‑checks
• Implement modern infrastructure provisioning via controllers such as Crossplane and ACK for Kubernetes‑native integration between cloud infrastructure and application delivery.
• Define and enforce Zero Trust architecture, implementing network and identity hardening through HashiCorp Vault (secrets management), Boundary (access broker), service identity, and secure service mesh mTLS.
• Engineer policy‑driven automation and compliance frameworks, leveraging OPA, Kyverno, and secure supply chain and runtime configurations.
• Develop and maintain IaC and GitOps standards and introduce automated testing for every infrastructure change.
• Prototype and integrate agentic infrastructure components, including Agentic deployment and observability platforms within Kubernetes service meshes.
• Design and integrate AI Gateways and Registries that route traffic and events between microservices and autonomous agents through CNCF Gateway API constructs.
• Champion DevSecOps maturity and experimentation, embedding SAST/DAST, chaos engineering, and error budget tracking to drive continuous improvement.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with Security, Data, and AI engineering to shape the intersection of DevOps and agentic AI platform architectures for high‑integrity, regulatory‑compliant operations
• Continuously research and adopt emerging CNCF and AI ecosystem advancements, from eBPF observability to agent‑aware orchestration, to keep Elliptic at the forefront of DevOps innovation.

Requirements

• Have a passion for building reliable, secure, and scalable systems, and leading others to do the same
• Thrive on setting strategy and rolling up your sleeves to implement it
• Are driven by a strong customer and product focus
• Embrace ownership and decision-making in fast-moving environments
• Want to build high-performing, autonomous teams and shape DevOps culture at scale
• Align technical leadership with business outcomes
• Are transparent, collaborative, and committed to learning and improvement
• Production experience with most of the following: Platform as Product expertise, defining vision, roadmaps, and user research loops for internal developer platforms (IDPs).
• Deep Kubernetes expertise including full cluster lifecycle management, API extension, custom Operator development, Helm charts, and working across the CNCF ecosystem (addons such as Cilium, ExternalDNS, Kyverno, Gatekeeper).
• Designing and operating multi‑cluster, multi‑region Kubernetes deployments with service meshes (Istio, Consul, Linkerd) and policy‑based workload placement.
• Advanced networking — service mesh federation, mTLS at scale, and eBPF/Cilium observability tracing.
• Writing Infrastructure‑as‑Code using Terraform against AWS / GCP, with modular architectures, state segmentation, GitOps integration, automated testing (Terratest/InSpec), and controlled version promotion.
• Provisioning and governing cloud resources using Kubernetes‑native controllers such as Crossplane, ACK, or KRO, aligning infrastructure and application delivery.
• Implementing GitOps pipelines with ArgoCD or FluxCD, enabling progressive delivery, automated drift correction, and multi‑environment deployments.
• Building cloud‑native container, serverless, and event‑driven systems grounded in observability and resilience, with tracing, metrics, and logs correlated through DataDog, Splunk, or OpenTelemetry.
• Managing platform security through Vault‑based secret management, least‑privilege access with HashiCorp Boundary or AWS IAM policies, and compliance automation.
• Establishing robust CI/CD architectures integrating SAST/DAST, policy enforcement, and cost / performance telemetry.
• Applying SLOs, error budgets, and chaos engineering to continuously improve reliability and service quality.
• Leading DevOps culture initiatives, building self‑service developer platforms, defining golden paths, and coaching teams in platform‑driven delivery.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Cloud
• Consul
• Flux
• Google Cloud Platform
• Kubernetes
• Microservices
• Splunk
• Terraform
• Vault

Benefits

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year
• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space
• $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development
• Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays
• An extra day for your birthday
• Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave and leave.
• Private Health Insurance
• we use Vitality!
• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support
• Life Assurance: we hope you will never need this
• but our cover is for 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries
• £100 Crypto for you!
• Cycle to Work Scheme