Principal DevOps Team Lead

Catapult Sports; City Of London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading sports technology company in London is seeking a Principal DevOps Team Lead to guide the infrastructure strategy and mentor a cross-functional team. This hands-on leadership role involves collaborating with engineering and security teams while ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks. The ideal candidate has over 7 years of experience, particularly in AWS and infrastructure automation. Join a dynamic team dedicated to transforming sports performance through innovative technology.

Benefits

Collaborative work environment

Opportunities for growth

Work with ambitious teams

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud platform.
• Solid understanding of AppSec principles.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a cross-functional DevOps/Platform Engineering team.
• Define and drive long-term infrastructure strategy.
• Champion automation and operational excellence.

Skills

DevOps

Infrastructure Engineering

AWS

Infrastructure Automation

CI/CD Pipelines

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Monitoring Tools

Job description

Our mission is to improve the performance of athletes and teams, which we do by engineering the premier technology platform for sport. We've been at the forefront of sports technology and science since 2006 - we don't just work in the sporting industry, we are actively changing its future. Our solutions are designed to help athletes and coaches “play smart” in a world where 1% can literally mean the difference between winning and losing.

We work with over 4,600 teams around the world, empowering coaches, managers and trainers in premier teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, EPL, AFL, NRL, NCAA and more. We provide the information they need to optimize athletes’ health, game-day readiness, and performance, as well as in-game tactics. Our solutions include video analytics and athlete monitoring solutions, and we are passionate about helping sports organizations at all levels to better scout, recruit, teach, and win.

About the Role

We are building the next-generation cloud platform that unites digital video, wearable data, and athlete information to unlock powerful insights for coaches, sports scientists, and athletes. Our vision is to empower every athlete to reach their full potential by transforming data into meaningful performance breakthroughs. As our DevOps Team Lead, you will be at the heart of this mission – guiding the systems, teams, and innovation that make it all possible. Together, we’ll shape the future of sports performance.

We are seeking a Principal DevOps Team Lead to own and scale our company’s infrastructure across both cloud and on-prem environments. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will set technical direction, drive best practices, and lead a team responsible for the reliability, security, cost efficiency, and scalability of our platforms. You’ll partner with engineering, security, and finance stakeholders to ensure that infrastructure is not just robust and compliant, but also a force multiplier for our product development teams.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and mentor a cross-functional DevOps/Platform Engineering team.
• Define and drive the long-term infrastructure strategy, balancing innovation, reliability, security, compliance, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with Engineering, Security, and Finance leadership to align infrastructure priorities with company goals.
• Champion automation, observability, and operational excellence across the organisation.
• Application Security (AppSec): Collaborate with security teams to embed security controls into CI/CD pipelines and platform services.
• FinOps / Cost Management: Establish cost governance practices, provide visibility into spend, and optimise usage across cloud platforms.
• Cloud Security & Compliance: Ensure compliance with relevant compliance and regulatory frameworks (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, HDS, GDPR as applicable) and implement best-in-class cloud security controls.
• Software Delivery Pipelines: Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, safe, and repeatable software delivery.
• Infrastructure Automation & IaC: Own infrastructure provisioning and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Observability & Reliability: Build and maintain logging, monitoring, alerting, and SLO/SLI frameworks to ensure system health and performance.
• Security & Compliance: Maintain compliance of on-prem infrastructure in line with corporate and regulatory requirements.
• Operations & Maintenance: Ensure the availability, scalability, and performance of physical and hybrid infrastructure, including networking, storage, and compute.

What You'll Need:

• Required
• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability, or Infrastructure Engineering, with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
• Deep expertise in the AWS cloud platform and associated security and compliance practices.
• Strong background in infrastructure automation (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling.
• Proven track record implementing and governing cost control / FinOps frameworks in cloud environments.
• Solid understanding of AppSec principles, including integrating security into build and deploy pipelines.
• Experience managing hybrid environments, including traditional data centers and on-prem services.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; ability to influence across engineering, security, and finance.
• Nice-to-Have
• Experience with regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, fintech).
• Familiarity with multiple compliance frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS).
• Strong networking and systems engineering background.
• Hands-on coding or scripting experience (Python, Go, or similar).

WHY CATAPULT?

• We have amazing people. We can promise you will work with some of the most ambitious and intelligent people in an exciting industry, and you will do some of the best work of your life.
• We encourage our people to have constructive, open and honest communication to make Catapult extraordinary; innovate and create smart solutions; establish a collaborative, yet challenging, environment to develop our performance and the performance of our customers.
• Our workforce spans more than 20 countries, you'll have the opportunity to work across multiple nationalities and cultures, and build your global awareness and capability
• We value improvement and development. We are challenging ourselves to continuously grow and become a high-performance company. That means we maintain a growth mindset in everything we do, and our people are always looking for ways to do things better. There is an unlimited opportunity to grow, do more, and do better.

Whether you’re interested in sports or not, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing your work is supporting some of the most successful teams and athletes on the planet!

Research shows that while men apply for jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalized groups tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't meet every single point in our job ad, please still get in touch! We would love to have a chat and see if you could be a great addition to our team.

We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all qualified candidates. We are committed to providing a fair and inclusive work environment and encourage applications from diverse candidates.