Lead DevOps Engineer

Salary: £43,000 - 83,000 per year

Requirements:

• We want someone with experience leading or mentoring engineering teams who can set direction while staying hands-on.
• We want strong Kubernetes knowledge, including cluster lifecycle management, API extensions, Operators, Helm, and the broader CNCF ecosystem.
• We want experience designing and operating multi-cluster, multi-region Kubernetes platforms with service meshes such as Istio, Consul, or Linkerd and policy-based workload placement.
• We want experience writing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform on AWS or GCP using modular design, GitOps integration, and automated testing.
• We want experience implementing GitOps pipelines with ArgoCD or FluxCD for progressive delivery, drift correction, and multi-environment releases.
• We want experience building containerized, serverless, or event-driven systems with strong observability.
• We want experience strengthening platform security through Vault-based secret management, least-privilege access, and compliance automation.
• We want experience designing CI/CD workflows that include SAST, DAST, policy enforcement, and performance telemetry.
• We want experience improving reliability and resilience through SLOs, error budgets, and chaos engineering.
• Nice to have: leading platform modernisation or reliability initiatives in scale-up or regulated environments.
• Nice to have: Operator development, CRD automation, eBPF, or Cilium for observability.
• Nice to have: policy-as-code using OPA or Kyverno within secure supply chain or CSPM frameworks.
• Nice to have: AI-driven internal developer platforms or predictive observability using AI or LLMs.
• Nice to have: designing agentic or autonomous infrastructures with observability for AI agents.
• Nice to have: familiarity with MCP and A2A orchestration patterns in Kubernetes service mesh environments.
• Nice to have: understanding of Agent Gateways and Registries connecting microservices and AI agents.
• Nice to have: background in secure containers, sandboxing, or confidential computing for regulated workloads.
• Nice to have: experience with data-intensive systems such as Spark, Databricks, or Data Mesh.
• Nice to have: programming experience in Go, Python, or TypeScript.
• Nice to have: contributions to open-source or CNCF community projects.

Responsibilities:

• Own our DevOps and Platform roadmap, including Kubernetes platform evolution, application packaging and migration to EKS, and enabling engineering teams to ship reliably to production.
• Lead by doing: engineer, review, and enhance Kubernetes and CNCF-aligned infrastructure, setting technical standards.
• Architect multi-cluster, multi-region environments using Istio/Linkerd, Cluster API, and Kyverno.
• Build progressive delivery frameworks with Flux and Flagger for GitOps-driven, canary, and automated releases.
• Implement modern provisioning with controllers like Crossplane and ACK for Kubernetes-native cloud integration.
• Define and enforce Zero Trust architecture with Vault, Boundary, service identity, and mTLS-secured meshes.
• Engineer policy-driven automation and compliance using OPA, Kyverno, and secure supply chain configurations.
• Establish IaC and GitOps standards, adding automated testing to every infrastructure change.
• Prototype agentic infrastructure components, including deployment and observability platforms in service meshes.
• Design AI Gateways and Registries for traffic and event routing between microservices and autonomous agents via CNCF Gateway APIs.
• Champion DevSecOps maturity by embedding SAST/DAST, chaos engineering, and error budget monitoring.
• Collaborate with Security, Data, and AI teams to shape DevOps and AI platform architectures with regulatory compliance.
• Stay ahead of CNCF and AI ecosystem innovations, from eBPF observability to agent-aware orchestration.

Technologies:

• AI
• AI Agents
• API
• AWS
• Architect
• ArgoCD
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Databricks
• DevSecOps
• DevOps
• GCP
• GitOps
• Helm
• Istio
• Support
• Kubernetes
• MCP
• Python
• Security
• Serverless
• Spark
• Terraform
• TypeScript
• microservices
• Datadog
• OpenTelemetry
• Splunk

More:

We are Elliptic, and we help trace and disrupt illicit crypto laundering across blockchains, supporting compliance and investigations teams with transaction tracking and screening at 99% market coverage. We are hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own and evolve our DevOps practices, lead a team of DevOps engineers, and stay close to the technical work. This is a hands-on team lead role based in London, United Kingdom, within our Engineering department. The role is full time and hybrid, with the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year. We offer a 500 remote working budget, a $1,000 learning and development budget, 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays, an extra day for your birthday, enhanced parental leave, private health insurance, full access to Spill Mental Health Support, life assurance at 4 times salary, and a Cycle to Work Scheme. We are committed to diversity, inclusion, equity, and psychological safety, and we welcome applications from everyone.

last updated 35 week of 2026