Senior / Lead DevOps Engineer

Job location: Warsaw, hybrid model (onsite 3 days per week)

About the role

We are partnering with a leading international financial services firm to hire a Senior / Lead DevOps Engineer for its Warsaw-based team. In this role, you will drive CI/CD, release engineering, and artifact management across a fintech environment, supporting engineering teams through automation, modern SDLC practices, and platform standardization. With a predominantly on-premise estate transitioning to GCP and GitLab, you will play a key role in shaping delivery standards, improving software delivery processes, and, at Lead level, providing technical leadership and mentoring across team

Key responsibilities:

• Design, improve, and maintain CI/CD pipelines, with GitLab as the primary platform and GitHub supported during transition
• Build automation, scripts, and internal tools that improve software delivery, testing, deployment, and operational workflows
• Support cloud-ready delivery practices, including build environments, artifact promotion, and environment separation
• Embed security into pipelines: secrets management, dependency and container scanning, and artifact signing
• Partner with development, cloud, and platform teams to understand their use cases, and advise on SDLC, branching strategies, pipeline design, and release practices
• Troubleshoot complex issues across the application, pipeline, infrastructure, and cloud layers
• Contribute to engineering tooling standards and delivery governance alongside the DevOps Product Manager and Head of DevOps
• Apply AI-assisted tooling to accelerate pipeline authoring, troubleshooting, and documentation

At Lead level, you will additionally:

• Mentor engineers across the central DevOps team and set technical direction for CI/CD and release engineering
• Lead cross-team initiatives such as pipeline migrations onto GitLab and adoption of shared CI/CD components
• Represent DevOps in design reviews and planning with engineering leads

Skills / Experience Required:

• Proven experience in DevOps, release engineering, automation, or platform engineering, ideally including pipelines or templates you built that multiple teams now use
• Deep hands-on CI/CD expertise — pipeline design, SDLC practices, and modern delivery workflows — on GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub, or comparable platforms
• Scripting and automation skills in Bash, Python, or similar languages
• Solid Linux knowledge, including command-line tooling, debugging, and system-level troubleshooting
• Experience managing package, artifact, or container registries such as Nexus, Artifactory, GitLab Package Registry, or Docker registries
• Clear communication skills: able to advise teams, explain technical recommendations, and challenge assumptions constructively
• Practical use of AI-assisted tools to improve engineering output, with sound judgement on validating results and protecting confidential information

Qualifications:

• Senior level: typically 5+ years of relevant experience in DevOps, automation, platform, release, or software engineering
• Lead level: typically 8+ years, including experience mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, or driving cross-team initiatives
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is beneficial; equivalent practical experience is equally valued

Desirable Skills:

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or another regulated environment
• Practical cloud and container platform experience: GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, or Terraform
• Exposure to software supply chain security practices such as SBOMs, SLSA, or policy-as-code
• Development background in strongly typed languages such as Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, or TypeScript
• Familiarity with middleware, messaging, or enterprise application architectures
• Experience defining reusable pipeline templates, shared CI/CD components, or internal developer tooling

Personal attributes:

• Hands-on engineer with a service-oriented mindset toward the teams you support
• Comfortable in a dynamic environment with different teams, technologies, and delivery models
• Solves problems independently and builds consensus rather than imposing solutions
• Documents standards and decisions by default
• Articulates both written and spoken messages clearly and confidently
• Curious about new technologies, with a genuine interest in AI and automation

Systems & tools used:

• CI/CD and source control: GitLab (primary), Jenkins, GitHub, Git
• Package and artifact management: Nexus, Artifactory, GitLab Package Registry, Docker registries
• Automation and scripting: Bash, Python, Ansible, Terraform
• Platforms: Linux/RHEL, Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, with GCP adoption underway
• Delivery and documentation: Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow
• AI tools and chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot