Hybrid Head of Dev Ops

at Unity Advisory

• Job title: Head of Dev Ops
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, DNS, Grafana, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, London, United Kingdom

About the role

• Head of DevOps leading cloud platforms and developer enablement for AI-driven advisory firm. Overseeing strategy, infrastructure, and a high-impact team in a collaborative environment.

Responsibilities

• Own the cloud platform strategy and roadmap across product, partner, and data domains, aligned to business priorities and cost targets.
• Build and operate secure, scalable multi‑account cloud foundations with strong guardrails, identity boundaries, and least‑privilege access.
• Define and maintain golden paths for developers: repo bootstraps, CI/CD templates, IaC modules, and service archetypes.
• Lead and evolve CI/CD: trunk‑based development, pipelines, quality gates, artifact management, and progressive delivery.
• Establish robust platform SRE practices: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response, post‑incident reviews, and capacity planning.
• Implement platform security controls: secrets management, image scanning, SBOMs, policy‑as‑code, vulnerability management, and compliance reporting (e.g., ISO 27001 alignment).
• Provide first‑class observability: logging, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerting with actionable runbooks.
• Standardise infrastructure as code (Terraform / Helm) and GitOps for environments from dev to production.
• Partner with Data and Analytics to run reliable, governed data platforms, including compute, storage, orchestration, and secure data access.
• Support partner/client projects with repeatable patterns for secure landing zones, connectivity, and deployment workflows.
• Manage cloud cost visibility and optimisation: budgets, tagging, chargeback/showback, rightsizing, and lifecycle policies.
• Select and run core platform tooling: secrets, build, artifact, container registry, runtime, observability, and incident tooling.
• Lead a small, high‑impact DevOps/SRE team. Hire, mentor, and establish on‑call, ways of working, and career growth.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Data, Security, and IT to align platform standards, SSO/identity, and endpoint/device policies.
• Vendor and contract management for cloud and platform services, holding suppliers to SLAs and security requirements.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading DevOps/SRE or platform engineering for cloud‑native products and data workloads.
• Deep expertise in:
• Cloud & Networking: AWS or Azure core services, multi‑account design, VPC/VNet, private networking, load balancing, DNS, CDN.
• Containers & Runtime: Kubernetes or ECS/AKS, serverless, service mesh, autoscaling, blue/green and canary deploys.
• CI/CD & Automation: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar. Trunk‑based development and pipeline hardening.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform or Pulumi. Modularisation, environments, and policy‑as‑code (e.g., OPA/Conftest).
• Security & Compliance: Secrets management, IAM/Entra, key management, image scanning, SBOM, ISO 27001 practices.
• Observability & Reliability: Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, log aggregation, alerting, SLOs, incident response.
• Data Platform Basics: Storage tiers, orchestration, data pipelines, access controls, and cost governance.
• Track record creating developer golden paths and reducing lead time for changes while improving reliability.
• Strong stakeholder skills and the ability to balance speed, security, and cost.
• Excellent communication and leadership, with experience building and mentoring platform teams.
• Relevant certifications or equivalent experience are beneficial (e.g., AWS/Azure, CKAD/CKA, CISSP, ITIL for service practices).

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Retirement plans
• Paid time off
• Flexible working arrangements
• Professional development
• Equipment allowances