Head of DevOps and Platform Automation

Head of DevOps and Platform Automation

London - Hybrid

£100,000 - £120,000 + Bonus

VIQU are partnering with a leading financial services organisation undergoing a major transformation across its cloud and infrastructure landscape. They are seeking a Head of DevOps and Platform Automation to take ownership of a critical DevOps and tooling function that underpins the delivery of strategic change across a complex, enterprise-scale environment. This is a high-impact leadership role, responsible for driving DevOps maturity, CI/CD excellence, and automation strategy across multi-tenant cloud platforms, while leading geographically dispersed teams and ensuring robust operational performance, governance, and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities of the Head of DevOps and Platform Automation:

• Own and evolve the DevOps, CI/CD and automation strategy and roadmap across tooling and platform services
• Lead and develop a distributed DevOps and tooling team across UK and offshore locations, driving a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence
• Oversee end-to-end platform lifecycle management ensuring availability, resilience, security and compliance across all tooling environments
• Drive standardisation and optimisation of CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks and DevOps practices across the organisation
• Manage BAU performance, incident escalation and service reliability for critical DevOps platforms, including P1 management and stakeholder communications
• Oversee delivery of DevOps and tooling elements within major transformation programmes and cloud initiatives
• Act as a key stakeholder interface across IT, business and architecture teams to align tooling capability with strategic objectives
• Manage third-party vendors and suppliers, ensuring SLA adherence, performance optimisation and cost effectiveness
• Own budget management, resource planning and FinOps activity to ensure efficient platform and supplier spend
• Ensure compliance with governance, security and regulatory standards across all DevOps and tooling operations
• Champion automation, innovation and continuous improvement, including adoption of modern cloud and emerging technologies

Key Experience Required of the Head of DevOps and Platform Automation:

• Extensive experience (10+ years) within DevOps, infrastructure, platform engineering or tooling/automation leadership roles
• Strong background leading enterprise-scale DevOps or SRE teams within complex, global or regulated environments
• Deep expertise in CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins, GitLab CI and strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Strong experience working within Microsoft Azure cloud environments, ideally across hybrid or multi-cloud estates
• Proven track record of leading cloud-native engineering teams and driving DevOps maturity at scale
• Excellent stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders
• Strong vendor and supplier management experience, including SLA governance and performance management
• Experience managing operational budgets and driving cost optimisation, including FinOps practices
• Strong understanding of ITIL, service management, governance and secure cloud operating models
• Demonstrable experience working in matrix organisations and leading virtual, geographically dispersed teams
• Strong communication, leadership and decision-making skills in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
• Relevant cloud, DevOps or ITIL certifications highly desirable

Head of DevOps and Platform Automation

London - Hybrid

£100,000 - £120,000 + Bonus