Head of DevOps

Head of DevOps | Azure, Terraform, CI/CD Leadership | UK Insurer Modernising a 40-Strong DevOps Function

• Salary: £120,000 to £135,000, plus up to 20% annual bonus and a strong corporate benefits package • Location: London, hybrid (2 to 3 days in the office), plus roughly a day a fortnight at their IT hub in Sussex

You'll run the DevOps and automation function that keeps a UK insurer's technology delivery moving, a team of around 40 people the business treats as its engine room. Three team leads report to you across the UK and India, looking after the DevOps engineers embedded in the development squads, while four automation product owners cover areas like observability and platform engineering. This is a leadership seat, focused on how the team is structured, deployed and grown as the business changes, so your time goes on people, delivery and direction rather than the pipelines themselves.

The company is a long-established UK insurer with thousands of staff, a few years into a serious push on DevOps and automation. Around 70% of the estate is still legacy technology, so there's plenty to modernise. The function supports roughly 300 developers and a test team of about 70, with DevOps engineers currently deployed out to each development team to run their pipelines. It's a regulated environment (FCA), so governance and release reliability count for as much as speed.

They want someone who has led DevOps inside an end-user organisation rather than a career built inside an…