DevOps Lead

We are seeking an experienced DevOps & Operations Lead to oversee and optimise operations within the technology department of a cutting-edge insurance-focused environment. The successful candidate will have expertise in Azure and CI/CD processes, ensuring efficient and streamlined workflows., We are seeking an DevOps & Operations Lead to own our production environment and ensure the reliability and stability of our platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will build and configure the monitoring, instrumentation, and tooling needed to support day-to-day operations, while managing a small team of DevOps and technical support staff. You'll be the gatekeeper for production releases and the coordinator during incidents - someone who can quickly understand issues across the full stack and drive them to resolution., * Own the production environment: stability, performance, and availability are your responsibility

• Approve production releases, ensuring adequate testing and change management processes are followed
• Define, build, and configure monitoring, alerting, and instrumentation - choosing the right approach (build or buy) on a case-by-case basis
• Lead incident response: coordinate teams during outages, drive root cause analysis, and implement preventive measures
• Manage and develop a small team comprising DevOps and technical support staff
• Oversee DevOps practices: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, deployment automation
• Ensure testing adequacy before releases; work with development teams to maintain quality gates
• Build custom tooling and automation to improve operational efficiency and reduce manual intervention
• Participate in on-call rotation and respond to critical issues as needed

• A developer at heart who can build tooling, not just configure it - but pragmatic enough to know when off-the-shelf is the right choice
• Calm under pressure with a systematic approach to incident management
• Able to quickly understand and troubleshoot unfamiliar systems across the full stack
• Experienced in leading small teams and developing people
• Strong communicator who can coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders during incidents
• Proactive about identifying and addressing reliability risks before they become incidents, * Strong development background with the ability to write production-quality code for tooling and automation
• Extensive experience with Azure services (App Services, Functions, SQL, Storage, Networking, Monitor)
• Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or similar)
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (Application Insights, Log Analytics, Grafana, or similar)
• Proven experience managing production environments and leading incident response
• Understanding of release management, change control, and testing processes
• Experience managing or mentoring technical staff
• Comfortable working across the full stack to diagnose and resolve issues

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates)
• Background in .NET/C# development
• Experience in financial services or regulated environments
• Familiarity with SRE principles and practices