Lead AI DevOps Engineer

Lead AI-Enabled DevOps Engineer / DV Clearable / 5 days a week on-siteTechnical leadership at the intersection of software, platforms, and AI

We're seeking a Lead AI-Enabled DevOps Engineer to join a growing engineering capability and play a central role in shaping how AI is embedded into real, production-grade software systems.

This is not a traditional people-management role. Instead, you'll lead through technical depth, architectural judgement, and delivery experience by setting direction, guiding teams, and making informed decisions as AI capabilities are integrated into modern software platforms.

If you enjoy working where architecture, APIs, DevOps, and AI meet, and you care about building systems that are secure, operable, and genuinely useful, this role offers the chance to have real impact.

What you'll be doing Your focus will be on enabling AI within modern, API-first software platforms, particularly where legacy or existing systems need to evolve to support new capabilities safely and effectively.

You will:

• Provide technical leadership across AI-enabled software and DevOps engineering teams
• Set architectural direction for API-first design, system integration, and platform enablement for AI
• Lead the modernisation of legacy or existing applications toward service-based, API-driven architectures
• Define and guide integration patterns between applications, platforms, and AI services
• Make pragmatic decisions about when and how emerging AI integration approaches (e.g. protocols such as MCP) should be adopted
• Work closely with architects, product teams, data scientists, and platform engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions
• Ensure solutions meet standards for security, resilience, performance, and operability
• Anticipate and manage architectural and operational risks associated with AI-enabled systems
• Champion strong engineering practices across software development, DevOps, and platform engineering
• Lead by example in complex environments where production reliability matters

This is delivery-focused leadership, not experimentation for its own sake.

What we're looking for We're looking for someone who combines senior technical credibility with the confidence to guide others and shape direction.

Essential experience:

• Strong background as a Senior or Lead Software Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, or similar hands-on leadership role
• Excellent software engineering fundamentals: system design, clean code, testing, and long-term maintainability
• Deep experience designing and delivering API-driven and microservice-based systems
• Proven ability to modernise or integrate legacy systems into modern platforms
• Solid development experience in TypeScript and Python
• Experience spanning software delivery, CI/CD, infrastructure, and operations
• Comfortable setting direction and influencing teams without relying on formal authority
• Able to balance innovation with pragmatism in production environments

Desirable experience:

• Integrating software systems with AI platforms or AI-enabled services
• Exposure to emerging AI integration patterns or protocols (e.g. Model Context Protocol)
• Platform engineering or DevOps at scale
• Experience working in regulated or security-conscious environments
• Defining technical standards or architectural direction across multiple teams

You'll be trusted to make decisions that matter, and supported by teams who value strong engineering leadership. If interested, apply now!

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Vertage Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.