Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer - Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering)

Lloyds Bank plc; Greater Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 73,000 - 89,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension up to 15%

Annual bonus

Share schemes

Discounted shopping

30 days holiday

Wellbeing initiatives

Parental leave

Job summary

Lloyds Banking Group is hiring a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer to build and operate a Kubernetes-based platform for autonomous vulnerability research. You will implement secure, isolated environments, manage IaC across GCP, and ensure robust patching and access controls.

You will collaborate with AI Engineering and Security Architecture to scale runtimes safely while delivering audit-ready evidence and policy-compliant workflows.

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on Kubernetes experience across workload design, networking, autoscaling, RBAC, and multi-tenancy isolation.
• Strong Terraform and IaC skills with production cloud estate management.
• Substantial GCP experience (GKE, IAM, VPC networking, Cloud Build/Artifact Registry) or equivalent in another cloud.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Kubernetes-based platform hosting agentic research workloads.
• Own infrastructure-as-code across GCP using Terraform with reproducible environments.
• Engineer secure container and VM images with hardened baselines and automated patching.
• Implement egress-controlled networking, network policy, and segmentation for controlled access.
• Build CI/CD pipelines with supply-chain security and artefact provenance.

Skills

Kubernetes

Terraform

GCP / cloud

CI/CD

Tools

GKE

Cloud Build

Artifact Registry

Job description

End Date Tuesday 13 October 2026 Salary Range £72,702 - £80,780 We support flexible working – click here for more information on flexible working options Flexible Working Options Hybrid Working, Job Share

Job Description Summary . Job Description JOB TITLE: Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer - Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering) SALARY: Non-London: £72,702-£88,858 London: £84,051-£102,729 LOCATION(S): Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh OR London HOURS: Full-time WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites

About this opportunity

Within the Chief Security Office (CSO) our role is to protect the Group and our customers from security threats, and to enable the Group's businesses to make change to their services safely and quickly. We are establishing a new Autonomous Vulnerability Research (Harness Engineering) Team with a bold mission: to build the Group's agentic vulnerability research platform, enabling AI-powered vulnerability discovery, exploit validation, risk prioritisation, and remediation verification at unprecedented scale and speed. As a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer, you will build and operate the infrastructure that the harness runs on. Autonomous agents executing offensive security workloads demand an unusually high bar: strong isolation, tightly controlled egress, hardened runtimes, and complete evidential traceability. You will design that platform - making it fast for researchers and engineers to work on, and impossible to misuse.

What you’ll be doing:

• Design, build, and operate the Kubernetes-based platform hosting agentic research workloads, including ephemer and isolated execution environments.
• Own infrastructure-as-code across GCP using Terraform, delivering reproducible, reviewable, and policy-compliant environments.
• Engineer secure container and VM images with hardened baselines, minimal attack surface, and automated patching.
• Implement egress-controlled networking, network policy, service mesh controls, and segmentation to ensure agents can only reach sanctioned targets.
• Build CI/CD pipelines with integrated supply-chain security: SBOMs, image signing, artefact provenance, and automated policy gates.
• Deliver comprehensive observability - logs, metrics, distributed traces, and cost telemetry - across long-running, non-deterministic agent workloads.
• Build evidence-capture pipelines: immutable audit trails, artefact retention, and reproducible run records suitable for assurance and regulatory scrutiny.
• Manage secrets, identity, and workload authentication with least-privilege access across all platform components.
• Partner with AI Engineering to ensure agent runtimes scale efficiently and fail safely, and with Security Architecture to evidence control effectiveness.

Why join us?

We’re transforming at pace. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to change the way we meet the needs of our 28 million customers. We’re growing, and we’d love you to be part of the journey.

What we’re looking for:

• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience: workload design, networking, autoscaling, RBAC, and multi-tenancy isolation.
• Strong Terraform and infrastructure-as-code skills, with a track record of managing production cloud estates.
• Substantial GCP experience (GKE, IAM, VPC/networking, Cloud Build/Artifact Registry, or equivalents) - or comparable depth in another major cloud with willingness to work in GCP.
• Container and VM hardening expertise, including image minimisation, runtime security, and vulnerability management.
• Practical experience implementing egress control, network policy, and segmentation in cloud-native environments.
• Strong CI/CD engineering skills and experience embedding security controls into delivery pipelines.
• Observability expertise across logging, tracing, and metrics, including designing for auditability and evidence retention.
• A security-first mindset with the judgement to balance researcher velocity against containment requirements.
• undefined And any of these would be great: Experience building platforms for offensive security, malware analysis, or other high-risk workloads requiring strong isolation.
• Experience supporting AI/ML or LLM workloads, including GPU scheduling, inference infrastructure, or agent runtime environments.
• Cloud or Kubernetes certifications, or cyber security related qualifications and trainings.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure, platform, or security tooling.
• Experience operating within highly regulated environments such as financial services, including evidencing controls to audit and risk functions.

We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. Whilst this job advert may reference specific years of experience, we recognise that skills are developed in many ways, so if you have relevant, transferable experience, we encourage you to apply. This is a place for you Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we’re committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative. We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme. We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

At Lloyds Banking Group, we're driven by a clear purpose; to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you'll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop. We keep your data safe. So, we'll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks. We'll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person. We're focused on creating a values-led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.