Operations Engineering Lead

Ready to shape the infrastructure that powers engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead • Infrastructure Operations, you'll lead the platforms, tooling, and operations that keep our teams shipping safely and efficiently. Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances. Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here - https://www.cushon.co.uk/about So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead • Infrastructure Operations to provide technical leadership for our AWS base platform operations team. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations - the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager. The Role Delivery & technical leadership • Lead delivery of complex infrastructure and platform initiatives, managing dependencies& removing blockers. • Define and evolve the DevOps and infrastructure strategy, ownership model, and team boundaries. • Partner with engineering teams to deliver reliable, high-quality solutions aligned with business and regulatory requirements. • Collaborate with Engineering Leads to drive innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement. • Build strong relationships across product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders. • Enhance engineering practices across CI/CD, releases, incident management, and operational readiness. • Balance delivery priorities with technical debt, security requirements, and operational responsibilities. • Foster collaboration and alignment on shared platform and infrastructure initiatives. Infrastructure, reliability & security • Lead the evolution of deployment pipelines and system reliability across our monorepos and legacy platform (CircleCI, NX, Docker) • Guide AWS cloud strategy - hosting, networking, scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency across production environments • Oversee Infrastructure as Code practices (e.g. Terraform) and ensure environments are consistent, auditable, and secure • Shape monitoring, observability and alerting across the engineering organisation (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch) so issues are detected and resolved before customers are impacted4 • Lead incident management practices - on-call, triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook qualityChampion security best practices • IAM, WAF, encryption, VPC configuration, and compliance with industry and regulatory standards • Support capacity planning, cost optimisation, and production readiness for high-risk changes and coordinated cutovers People & developer experience • Coach and mentor Operations Engineers, fostering technical leadership, delivery excellence, and strong operational practices. • Remain hands-on when needed, contributing to designs, code, configuration, and runbooks while empowering the team to take ownership. • Enhance developer experience through self-service tools, streamlined environments, improved documentation, and effective onboarding. • Support hiring efforts and help raise the bar for engineering talent across the team. QUALIFICATIONS What you’ll bring Leadership & delivery • Strong technical expertise across cloud, infrastructure, and CI/CD. • Ability to balance architecture, delivery, reliability, and business priorities. • Champion engineering best practices, quality, security, and operational excellence. • Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills. • Proven people leader with a passion for coaching and developing engineers. • Strong strategic thinking and pragmatic decision-making. • Committed to building high-performing teams focused on customer and engineering outcomes. • Supporting a move across engineering to YBIYRI - “You build it, you run it” DevOps practices enabling teams to support anything they build in their domains. • Building FinOps frameworks and monitoring, focussing on cost optimization Technical experience • Experience in Operations, DevSecOps, SRE, or Cloud Infrastructure roles in fast-growing, regulated environments • Proven experience leading or acting as technical lead for a platform or operations team • Strong AWS infrastructure experience, including cost optimisation, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting • Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as OpenTofu, Terraform, or Cloud formation (OpenTofu preferred) • Expertise in observability - monitoring, logging, alerting, and APM (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) • Solid understanding of Docker and containerisation technologies • Deep CI/CD pipeline ownership and release governance in high-stakes environments • Knowledge of AWS security best practices, including IAM, VPCs, WAF, and encryption standards • Familiarity with developer tooling and monorepo CI patterns (e.g. CircleCI, Github Actions, NX) is desirable   What we offer Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. You'll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge. Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind. Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company. We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community. On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more. Start making the most of your career and wellbeing with a range of benefits tailored for you. Equal Opportunity Employer We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining WTW, please email candidatehelpdesk@wtwco.com