Operations Engineering Lead

Willis Towers Watson; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days annual leave

Private healthcare

Group life insurance

Pension scheme

Hybrid working

Volunteer day

Job summary

Cushon by WTW is seeking an Engineering Lead - Infrastructure Operations to guide platform, tooling, and operations. You will manage a team of 5-7 engineers, shaping infrastructure, hosting, release pipelines, and security practices to keep engineering teams shipping safely.

You will lead deployment pipelines, AWS strategy, IaC practices, and observability, while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product and security stakeholders. Hybrid work available.

Qualifications

• Leadership in an Ops/Platform setting with cross-functional delivery.
• Proven ability to drive DevOps strategy and infra evolution.
• Experience with cloud hosting, security, and cost optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives across teams and dependencies.
• Define technical strategy for DevOps and infrastructure.
• Improve delivery processes, incident response, and operational readiness.
• Coach engineers and foster strong collaboration with stakeholders.

Skills

Technical leadership

AWS & cloud infra

CI/CD & release

Stakeholder management

Observability & monitoring

Education

Experience leading platform/ops teams

Regulated environments exposure

Tools

Terraform/OpenTofu

CircleCI/Github Actions/NX

Datadog/CloudWatch

Job description

Description

Ready to shape the infrastructure that powers engineering at scale?

As our Engineering Lead - Infrastructure Operations, you'll lead the platforms, tooling, and operations that keep our teams shipping safely and efficiently.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.
Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here - https://www.cushon.co.uk/about

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead - Infrastructure Operations to provide technical leadership for our platform operations team. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations - the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role

Delivery & technical leadership

• Drive successful delivery of complex, cross-team infrastructure and platform initiatives by coordinating resources, managing dependencies, and removing blockers
• Define and communicate technical strategy for DevOps and infrastructure - what we own, how we evolve it, and where boundaries sit with product and platform teams
• Ensure the DevOps team works effectively with engineering squads, delivering high-quality, reliable solutions aligned with business and regulatory goals, engaging with Engineering Leads from other teams to foster knowledge sharing, collaborative working and pushing the boundaries forward.
• Build strong relationships across product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders
• Improve delivery processes and engineering practices within infrastructure and operations - CI/CD, release governance, incident response, and operational readiness
• Help the team maintain focus on priorities while managing technical debt, security obligations, and day-to-day operational responsibilities
• Foster collaboration and alignment across teams on shared platform work

Infrastructure, reliability & security

• Lead the evolution of deployment pipelines and system reliability across our monorepos and legacy platform (CircleCI, NX, Docker)
• Guide AWS cloud strategy - hosting, networking, scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency across production environments
• Oversee Infrastructure as Code practices (e.g. Terraform) and ensure environments are consistent, auditable, and secure
• Shape monitoring, observability and alerting across the engineering organisation (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch) so issues are detected and resolved before customers are impacted4
• Lead incident management practices - on-call, triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality
• Champion security best practices - IAM, WAF, encryption, VPC configuration, and compliance with industry and regulatory standards
• Support capacity planning, cost optimisation, and production readiness for high-risk changes and coordinated cutovers

People & developer experience

• Coach and mentor Operations Engineers in delivery practices, technical leadership, and operational excellence
• Stay hands-on - contributing designs, code, config, and runbooks when that is the fastest way to reduce risk but also know when to step back and allow the team to take the helm
• Improve developer experience: local environments, self-service tooling, documentation, and onboarding for new engineers
  Contribute to hiring and raising the bar for future Operations Engineers

Qualifications

What you’ll bring

Leadership & delivery

• Technical depth to guide architectural decisions and trade-offs across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and operational systems
• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs
• Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability
• Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels
• Effective Line management and the passion to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
• Strategic and tactical decision-making abilities
• Commitment to creating an empowering team environment that prioritises customer experience and engineering productivity
• Supporting a move across engineering to YBIYRI - “You build it, you run it” DevOps practices enabling teams to support anything they build in their domains.
• Building FinOps frameworks and monitoring, focussing on cost optimization

Technical experience

• Experience in Operations, DevSecOps, SRE, or Cloud Infrastructure roles in fast-growing, regulated environments
• Proven experience leading or acting as technical lead for a platform or operations team
• Strong AWS infrastructure experience, including cost optimisation, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as OpenTofu, Terraform, or Cloud formation (OpenTofu preferred)
• Expertise in observability - monitoring, logging, alerting, and APM (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch)
• Solid understanding of Docker and containerisation technologies
• Deep CI/CD pipeline ownership and release governance in high-stakes environments
• Knowledge of AWS security best practices, including IAM, VPCs, WAF, and encryption standards
• Familiarity with developer tooling and monorepo CI patterns (e.g. CircleCI, Github Actions, NX) is desirable

What we offer

Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. You'll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge. Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind. Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company.

We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community. On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more. Start making the most of your career and wellbeing with a range of benefits tailored for you.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining WTW, please email [e-mail]