Director / VP of DevOps

linkup; Belfast; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A global technology organisation is searching for a Director / VP of DevOps to lead the Cloud and Platform Engineering strategy for a high-availability payments platform. Responsibilities include defining long-term DevOps strategies, overseeing teams, and driving best practices in automation, CI/CD, and observability. The ideal candidate has proven leadership experience at the Director/VP level, strong cloud architecture knowledge, and excellent communication skills. Competitive salary and benefits offered, with significant influence in shaping the engineering culture.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Bonus and benefits package

High autonomy in role

Qualifications

• Proven leadership experience at Director/VP level in DevOps, SRE, Cloud or Platform Engineering.
• Strong understanding of cloud systems (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Experience with IaC, CI/CD, and modern deployment strategies.
• Excellent collaboration with engineering and executive teams.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term DevOps and Cloud strategy.
• Lead and develop senior engineers and managers across teams.
• Drive automation and continuous delivery practices.
• Oversee CI/CD pipeline evolution for reliability and speed.

Skills

Leadership in DevOps

Cloud architecture knowledge

IaC and Containerisation

CI/CD tooling expertise

Strong communication skills

Job description

About the Company

Our client is a global technology organisation supporting a large portfolio of software partners. They operate a multi‑cloud, highly distributed platform and are investing significantly in engineering transformation.

The Role

As Director / VP of DevOps, you will lead the Cloud, DevOps, and Platform Engineering strategy for a high‑availability payments platform operating across AWS, Azure, and GCP. You will oversee teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, developer tooling, observability, release reliability, and operational readiness. This is a senior technical leadership role that requires strategic direction‑setting, hands‑on technical understanding, and the ability to influence engineering behaviours at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and implement the long‑term DevOps, Cloud and Platform Engineering strategy across multi‑cloud environments
• Lead and develop managers and senior engineers across DevOps, Cloud Engineering, SRE and platform operations
• Drive best practices in automation, infrastructure‑as‑code, containerisation and continuous delivery
• Oversee the evolution of CI/CD pipelines, ensuring reliability, speed and alignment with engineering needs
• Build high‑quality observability across the platform, improving insights around performance, stability and release health
• Partner closely with Test, Security and Engineering leadership to ensure robust, secure and compliant deployments
• Own cloud operational expenditure and create optimisation strategies for platform efficiency and resilience
• Champion engineering excellence through improved tooling, self‑service capabilities and streamlined developer workflows
• Provide clear reporting, KPIs and risk visibility to senior leadership and executive stakeholders
• Influence culture and ways of working by promoting automation‑first, reliability‑first thinking across engineering teams

Essential Criteria

• Proven leadership experience heading DevOps, SRE, Cloud or Platform Engineering teams at Director/VP level
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture across AWS, Azure or GCP, ideally within complex distributed systems
• Deep experience with IaC, containerisation, CI/CD tooling, pipeline design and modern deployment strategies
• Demonstrated capability to modernise engineering practices across multiple teams or business units
• Strong approach to observability covering logs, metrics, tracing, performance monitoring and incident response
• Excellent communication skills and an ability to partner with engineering, product, test and executive teams
• Experience managing budgets, operational expenditure and large‑scale cloud environments
• Background in payments, fintech, SaaS or similarly high‑availability domains is beneficial

Why Join

• Lead the DevOps and Cloud strategy for a global, mission‑critical payments platform
• Major opportunity to modernise infrastructure, tooling and engineering practices
• Work with highly experienced leaders across engineering, product and architecture
• Competitive salary, bonus and benefits package
• High influence, high autonomy and a key role in shaping future engineering culture

How to Apply

If you believe you meet the criteria for this role and are excited about shaping DevOps strategy for a global technology platform, please apply via this link. Alternatively, you can reach out to Phil Gamble directly for an informal chat via LinkedIn or WhatsApp.

Recruiter: Phil Gamble – experienced tech recruitment professional.