Head of DevOps

Head of DevOps | London (Hybrid) | Financial Services

Our client is hiring a Head of DevOps to take ownership of a global, enterprise-scale data platform operating in a regulated financial services environment.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone with deep DevOps and cloud infrastructure expertise who knows what it takes to run mission-critical data systems reliably, securely, and at scale. You’ll lead the strategy, architecture, and day-to-day operational excellence of our data infrastructure across multiple regions and cloud platforms.

You’ll work closely with distributed engineering teams across London, Eastern Europe, and India, ensuring our platforms meet the highest standards of availability, performance, and compliance.

What you’ll be responsible for

Data infrastructure leadership

• Own the design, deployment, and operation of enterprise data infrastructure across GCP (primary), AWS, and Oracle
• Ensure reliability, scalability, performance, and availability of all data platform services
• Set and enforce infrastructure architecture standards across environments
• Drive infrastructure-as-code, automation, and platform consistency
• Lead capacity planning, cost optimisation, and technical debt reduction

DevOps & operational excellence

• Establish and enforce best-in-class DevOps and SRE practices
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment frameworks
• Define and manage SLAs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and observability
• Lead incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement
• Own disaster recovery and business continuity strategies

Messaging & database platforms

• Lead Kafka-based messaging infrastructure at scale
• Oversee MongoDB and other database platforms, including performance tuning and capacity management
• Define backup, recovery, and data retention strategies
• Ensure database security, access controls, and regulatory compliance

Cloud & platform operations (GCP-focused)

• Lead GCP infrastructure operations across compute, storage, networking, and security
• Manage IAM, RBAC, and cloud security controls
• Implement governance and cloud cost management frameworks
• Drive cloud-native modernisation while maintaining multi-cloud capability

Leadership & collaboration

• Build and develop high-performing infrastructure and operations teams
• Foster a culture of automation, reliability, and operational discipline
• Partner with data engineering, security, risk, and compliance teams
• Embed regulatory and governance controls directly into infrastructure design

What we’re looking for

Essential experience

• 10+ years in infrastructure engineering, platform operations, or DevOps
• Proven experience leading large-scale DevOps or operational excellence initiatives
• Deep expertise in GCP (AWS/Azure experience a strong plus)
• Strong production experience with Kafka or equivalent messaging platforms
• Hands-on database expertise (MongoDB, plus relational databases)
• Strong infrastructure-as-code background (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation)
• CI/CD, containerisation, and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Solid monitoring and observability experience (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience operating in regulated environments, ideally financial services

Desirable

• Google Cloud Professional certifications
• Experience with data platforms (Airflow, Spark, data warehouses)
• Multi-region, global infrastructure experience
• SRE background
• Oracle database or Oracle Cloud experience
• Strong understanding of cloud networking and security

Please apply now for immediate consideration!