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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Lead DevOps Engineer (AI Early Stage Startup) - **Company:** Foundation Partners - **Location:** London, UK - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** £150,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Application Release Automation, Continuous Integration, Software Debugging, DevOps, Distributed Systems, Key Management, Octopus Deploy, Reliability Engineering, Data Logging, Kubernetes, Terraform - **Published:** July 3, 2026 - **Apply:** https://uk.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=6455bf14d5398e98 ## About the Role The ideal candidate will have come from a FAANG, Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir type organisation, or from an exceptional AI startup, where they have personally owned and built the DevOps function while remaining hands on. This isn't someone who managed a team that did the work. It's someone who did the work themselves at a high standard, and knows what world class infrastructure looks like because they've built it before. * At least 4 years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure * You've owned production systems rather than only contributing to them, including multi-tenant or customer-specific environments, and you understand the complexity that comes with them * Deep fluency with Kubernetes, a major cloud (AWS preferred), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code, plus the judgment to know when not to add another layer * You come from somewhere that held a high bar, and you expect engineering excellence from yourself and the systems around you * You're hands-on and have no interest in a purely architectural role. You explain complex tradeoffs simply and don't over-engineer. * You treat speed, security, cost, and reliability as constraints that all apply at once, and you've struck that balance before * Bonus: you've operated under formal security or compliance regimes (SOC2, HIPAA, or similar) and know how to make controls a strength rather than a tax ## Description Lead DevOps Engineer Central London (Hybrid, 2-3 days/week) | Up to £150,000 | Just out of seed Own secure, multi-tenant infrastructure end-to-end, from GitOps to compliance controls, in a hands-on, fast-paced role shaping one of the most ambitious applications of AI today. The opportunity This is a rare shot to join right at the inflection point. Our client just closed their seed round and is now scaling fast: a team of just 15 building an AI operating system for a demanding, security-conscious industry. A unified intelligence layer that connects evidence, reasoning, and action across a complex, high-stakes lifecycle where getting it right matters enormously. The founding team includes operators who spent years deploying production AI inside some of the world's most demanding enterprise environments. They know what it takes to make ambitious technology hold up under real pressure, and they're now applying that standard to a domain that's ripe for transformation. This is early enough that what you build becomes the foundation everything else stands on, and senior enough that you'll be working alongside people who've done this at the highest level before. The systems being built run inside security-conscious, compliance-bound enterprises, where the infrastructure underneath has to be as trustworthy as the intelligence layered on top of it. The company now needs a Lead DevOps Engineer to own that infrastructure end to end. At a team of 15, this isn't a role where you sit in a queue of tickets. You'll be the single, clear owner of how the company deploys, operates, secures, and scales, across its own platform and across isolated customer environments where the bar for trust is absolute. It's a huge amount of responsibility and autonomy, which is exactly the appeal. What you'll own * The GitOps deployment backbone on Argo CD, so a small team can ship continuously and safely across many clusters * Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) across the fleet of production environments * Infrastructure-as-code in Terraform/OpenTofu and Terragrunt, the source of truth for everything the company runs * Multi-tenant, per-customer isolation: standing up a fully isolated, compliant environment for each customer, with its own cluster and data plane, and deploying to it with confidence. This is the hardest and most important part of the job. * Security and compliance posture: secrets management, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and the audit-grade controls customers will hold you to * Observability: telemetry, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting that keep a complex distributed system legible * Reliability, incident response, and the operational runbooks that protect customer trust * CI/CD and release automation that keep the shipping cadence high * Developer experience: making it fast and painless for engineers to deploy and debug ## Related Videos - [From DevOps to Scaled DevOps: How We’re Rebuilding Continuous Delivery as a Platform](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100018-from-devops-to-scaled-devops-how-we-re-rebuilding-continuous-delivery-as-a-platform) - [Shipping Faster with Less: Render on Cloud Hosting, AI Workloads, and the Future of DevOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1894-shipping-faster-with-less-render-on-cloud-hosting-ai-workloads-and-the-future-of-devops) - [Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100085-understanding-kubernetes-in-a-visual-way) - [Infrastructure as Code: The Developer's Secret Weapon](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1221-infrastructure-as-code-the-developer-s-secret-weapon) - [AI-Augmented DevOps with Platform Engineering](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1614-ai-augmented-devops-with-platform-engineering) - [Instant KAI Sandboxes with vCluster: Multi-Tenant, Multi-Scheduler GPU Sharing](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100333-instant-kai-sandboxes-with-vcluster-multi-tenant-multi-scheduler-gpu-sharing) ## Related Articles - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [Dev Digest 121 - AI goes offline](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/456-dev-digest-121-ai-goes-offline) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [What is Software Engineering in the Age of AI?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/640-what-is-software-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai) - [From Prototype to Production: Build AI Agents with This Free 4-Course Learning Path](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/655-from-prototype-to-production-build-ai-agents-with-this-free-4-course-learning-path)