Lead Associate - DevOps

The Lead Associate - DevOps plays a central role in designing, building, and maintaining Davies’ Azure cloud environment. The role supports the organisation’s cloud-first strategy, enabling scalable, secure, and automated delivery of modern platform services and helping accelerate our transition from on‑premise infrastructure into cloud‑native operations. This role is responsible for delivering high-quality automation, infrastructure-as-code patterns, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud governance structures. You will work closely with Application Architects, Developers, Product Managers, and Infrastructure Engineers to ensure cloud services are robust, efficient, and aligned to strategic technology direction. The Lead Associate - DevOps contributes to the evolution of DevOps capabilities, driving best practices across engineering teams and acting as a subject matter expert in Azure services, automation tooling, and operational cloud excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture, Design & Implementation Design, plan and implement Azure cloud solutions with a strong focus on automation, IaC, and DevOps principles. Lead and deliver cloud platform projects including systems architecture, proofs-of-concept, and production deployments. Support the transition of on-premise workloads into Azure, ensuring resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency. Contribute to the development of cloud governance frameworks covering networking, identity, security, tagging, and operational processes.
Automation, Tooling & DevOps Build, maintain, and optimise Azure CI/CD pipelines (YAML-based), integrating automated testing and quality checks. Develop infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, ARM/Bicep, and Git-based workflows. Create and maintain scripts using PowerShell and AZ CLI to drive automation, repeatability, and operational efficiency. Ensure cloud environments follow best practice for monitoring, logging, backup, and disaster recovery.
Collaboration & Delivery Partner closely with .NET development teams to strengthen cloud-native development and deployment skills. Work alongside Application Architects and Security teams to ensure platform designs meet strategic and compliance requirements. Support Product Managers to ensure platform initiatives align to business objectives and delivery timelines. Provide technical input on solution designs, cloud patterns, and build/release strategies.
Support, Operations & Continuous Improvement Resolve cloud-related issues, ensuring reliability, performance, and security of Azure services. Identify opportunities for automation, optimisation, and governance improvement across the platform. Actively contribute to continuous improvement in DevOps maturity, engineering tooling, and cloud operating models. Maintain high- quality documentation covering cloud environments, patterns, and processes.
Coaching & Mentoring Provide coaching and mentorship to less experienced developers. Support skill development across teams using the SFIA-based capability framework. Lead by example in professionalism, technical discipline, and collaboration.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure IaaS and PaaS services in a DevOps environment.
• Advanced experience building Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines (including YAML).
• Strong proficiency in Terraform (or comparable IaC tooling).
• Strong scripting skills using PowerShell and AZ CLI.
• Understanding of cloud governance, security, networking, identity, RBAC, and resource organisation.
• Knowledge of DevOps principles including automation, observability, GitOps, and continuous delivery.
• Experience supporting cloud migrations from on-premise environments.