Lead DevOps Engineer

The successful candidate will act as the primary liaison with our AWS contacts as well as internal DevOps team leads across other business units, ensuring alignment and collaboration on best practices and technical initiatives. We are looking for a seasoned and enthusiastic Lead DevOps Engineer to steer the strategic direction of our global DevOps operations. This pivotal role involves crafting our automation, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure strategies, while also guiding and mentoring a team of DevOps Engineers.

• Define, maintain, and communicate the DevOps strategic roadmap, ensuring continuous improvements and alignment with business goals.
• Design and implement Build and Release process improvements for development teams.
• Act as the primary point of contact for AWS representatives and collaborate with internal DevOps team leads across other business units to drive consistency and knowledge sharing.
• Develop and implement automation tools to improve development and operational efficiencies.
• Optimise and streamline automation processes across development and operations.
• Lead proof-of-concept (PoC) initiatives and collaborate with product teams for final implementation.
• Author and maintain technical design documents outlining key DevOps processes and solutions.
• Actively participate in technical design reviews and provide valuable feedback to engineering teams.
• Mentor and coach DevOps Engineers, fostering skill development and best practice adoption.
• Contribute to recruitment efforts and participate in resourcing discussions.
• Provide performance feedback for DevOps team members in line with job expectations.
• Monitor and assess the implementation of strategic DevOps improvements and best practices within teams.
• Organise and coordinate cross-product DevOps forums, facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Maintain and operate central development services, such as source code and package repositories, in conjunction with Infrastructure teams.
• Ensure compliance with Verisk security best practices, cloud governance, and regulatory requirements.
• Support ongoing incident response and resolution, ensuring high availability and reliability of DevOps services.

• Bachelor’s degree preferred in Computer Science or other relevant field and demonstrable related experience.

• Extensive experience in DevOps or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Strong AWS expertise, including services such as IAM, EC2, S3, Lambda, and RDS.
• Containerization proficiency, particularly Kubernetes and hosting platforms such as EKS.
• Experience deploying and maintaining database technologies, including Amazon RDS, Aurora, and SQL Server.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Hands-on experience with CloudFormation (Terraform experience also beneficial).
• Automated deployment tools: Experience with Octopus Deploy or similar CI/CD tools.
• Atlassian product suite proficiency, including Bamboo, JIRA, and Bitbucket.
• Scripting and automation: Strong experience in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Observability and Monitoring: Familiarity with New Relic, CloudWatch, PagerDuty, Splunk, or similar tools.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with a proactive and analytical mindset.
• Proven leadership experience, including mentoring and team development.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience working across multiple teams.

Nice to have:

• Experience with other cloud environments such as Azure.
• Experience with serverless architectures and event-driven systems.
• Background in highly regulated industries such as finance or insurance.