Senior DevOps Engineer (Platform Foundations & Enablement)

A major financial services organisation is undertaking an FX Modernisation Programme to establish a shared Technology Platform that will deliver common engineering, deployment, security, integration and operational capabilities across multiple Foreign Exchange (FX) technology teams within its Global Markets environment.

The platform will enable teams to develop solutions once and deploy them consistently across on-premises infrastructure, private cloud and AWS environments, while leveraging standardised platform services, engineering practices and security controls. The overarching objective is to reduce duplicated technology effort, strengthen engineering consistency and accelerate delivery across the FX technology landscape.

The successful candidate will act as a senior technical specialist within the Platform Engineering function, leading the establishment of foundational capabilities across Developer Enablement, Engineering Standards and Deployment Automation. The role will also involve onboarding initial workloads onto the target Kubernetes runtime platforms, while providing technical guidance, mentorship and leadership to engineers as the platform team expands.

Role Purpose

The primary objective of this role is to establish and operationalise the foundational platform capabilities across:

• Developer Enablement
• Engineering Standards & Security Gates
• CI/CD and GitOps
• Deployment Automation
• Platform Onboarding
• Kubernetes Runtime Enablement
• Infrastructure Automation
• Platform Governance

The successful candidate is not expected to be a deep specialist across every technology within the target architecture . Specialist capabilities across Messaging, Data Platforms, Security Services and Observability will be augmented through additional SMEs as the platform matures. The immediate focus is establishing Developer Tools & Enablement, Engineering Standards & Processes and Deployment automation & Management and supporting the initial onboarding into Application Runtime and Connectivity

Key Responsibilities

Platform Foundations

• Establish the foundational engineering platform consumed by multiple FX delivery teams.
• Define and implement platform standards, engineering patterns and reusable capabilities.
• Develop self-service onboarding capabilities for platform consumers.
• Establish platform governance, access controls and operating standards.
• Create reusable engineering assets that reduce duplication across teams.

CI/CD and Engineering Standards

• Design and implement standard GitHub repository structures.
• Implement branch protection, repository governance and code ownership models.
• Build and maintain reusable GitHub Actions workflows.
• Design and maintain reusable "golden workflows" and engineering templates consumed by feature teams.
• Implement security and quality gates within CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish software supply chain controls and artifact management practices.
• Implement SAST, SCA, DAST, container scanning and secrets scanning controls.

Deployment Automation & GitOps

• Implement GitOps deployment patterns using ArgoCD.
• Build and maintain Helm deployment standards.
• Configure automated environment promotion pipelines.
• Support release orchestration using Octopus Deploy.
• Define deployment governance, approval workflows and rollback mechanisms.
• Enable consistent deployments across Kubernetes and VM-based workloads.

Kubernetes & Runtime Enablement

• Support onboarding of workloads onto Rancher and AWS EKS platforms.
• Implement Kubernetes deployment standards and operational patterns.
• Configure RBAC, namespaces, security controls and deployment guardrails.
• Support Infrastructure-as-Code implementation and automation.
• Enable hybrid deployment patterns across AWS, on-premises and private cloud environments.

Platform Leadership

• Act as a senior engineering anchor within the platform team.
• Mentor future DevOps and Platform Engineers.
• Provide technical guidance to delivery teams adopting platform capabilities.
• Participate in architecture, governance and engineering standards discussions.
• Collaborate with Architecture, Operations and Feature Teams to onboard workloads and evolve platform capabilities.

Minimum Experience Requirements

Mandatory

• Minimum 6-8 years experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, cloud engineering or DevOps.
• Minimum 5 years practical DevOps or Platform Engineering experience.
• Minimum 3 years Kubernetes (KaaS) administration and deployment experience.
• Experience implementing enterprise CI/CD platforms.
• Experience implementing Infrastructure-as-Code solutions.
• Experience supporting production environments.
• Experience developing reusable engineering automation and platform capabilities.
• Experience working within regulated enterprise environments.

Preferred

• Financial Services experience
• Capital Markets or Trading Technology experience
• Hybrid cloud experience
• Experience supporting large-scale engineering organisations

Mandatory Technical Skills

Source Control & Developer Enablement

• GitHub Enterprise
• Repository Governance
• Branch Protection
• CODEOWNERS
• RBAC
• Developer Onboarding
• Git Workflows

CI/CD & Engineering Automation

• GitHub Actions
• CI/CD Pipeline Development
• Automated Testing Integration
• Release Automation
• Software Supply Chain Security
• Artifact Management
• Nexus Repository Manager (or equivalent enterprise artifact repository)

DevSecOps

• SAST
• SCA
• DAST
• Container Security Scanning
• Secrets Scanning
• Security Gate Implementation
• Vulnerability Management

Deployment Automation

• ArgoCD
• GitOps
• Helm
• Octopus Deploy
• Environment Promotion
• Release Governance

Kubernetes & Cloud Platforms

• Kubernetes / KaaS
• Rancher
• AWS EKS
• Container Platforms
• Linux Administration
• Infrastructure Automation

Infrastructure as Code

• Terraform – mandat
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• Automated Provisioning
• Configuration Automation

Highly Desirable Skills – advantageous but not mandatory

Security & Identity

• CyberArk
• AWS Secrets Manager
• Microsoft Entra ID
• Ping Identity
• Certificate Management

Runtime Services

• Istio
• IBM API Connect

Observability

• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Loki
• Tempo

Messaging

• Kafka
• IBM MQ
• Solace

Databases

• PostgreSQL