Principal DevOps Engineer at IFS1

About the role We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to own and evolve the core infrastructure that underpins our cloud‑native, AI‑enabled SaaS platforms. This role is about building platforms that scale, not firefighting. You will design, operate, and continuously improve a secure, highly available Kubernetes‑based platform that enables product engineering teams to deploy, operate, and evolve services safely and independently. You will work closely with software engineers, product teams, and security stakeholders to embed best‑in‑class DevOps and platform engineering practices across the organisation. Mission • Build and operate secure, scalable, highly available cloud infrastructure • Enable product teams through automation, self‑service, and clear standards • Raise the bar on reliability, security, observability, and deployment quality • Act as a technical leader across platform and infrastructure initiativesWhat success looks like You will be accountable for outcomes such as: • Highly available, fault‑tolerant platforms • All containerised services are deployed with appropriate replication, resilience, and resource limits • Workloads are designed for multi‑zone availability and safe failure modes • Zero‑downtime, high‑quality delivery • CI/CD pipelines support safe deployment patterns (e.g. rolling, canary, fast rollback) • Deployment‑related incidents are eliminated or rapidly mitigated • Empowered engineering teams • Engineers can diagnose and resolve the majority of platform‑related issues independently • Clear standards, tooling, and automation reduce cognitive load and friction • Strong security posture • Infrastructure and workloads follow security‑by‑default principles • Vulnerabilities are proactively identified, prioritised, and remediated • Platform security tooling is continuously maintained and improved • Comprehensive observability • All critical services are monitored with meaningful alerts and dashboards • Teams have access to self‑service monitoring and alerting capabilitiesKey responsibilities • Design, build, and operate cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code • Own and evolve Kubernetes platforms, including workload standards and deployment models • Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows • Embed security best practices across infrastructure, pipelines, and runtime environments • Improve platform reliability, monitoring, and incident response workflows • Act as a technical leader and mentor for engineers using the platform • Partner with product and engineering teams to anticipate future platform needsWhy join us? • Own and shape a modern platform engineering capability • Work on real production systems supporting AI‑enabled SaaS products • High trust, high autonomy engineering culture • Opportunity to influence platform strategy as the organisation scales