Lead DevOps Engineer

Job Summary

• We are seeking a skilled Lead DevOps Engineer with strong mastery of Kubernetes and modern platform engineering practices to join our technology team. The successful candidate will be responsible for designing, building, securing, deploying, and operating scalable cloud-native platforms and delivery pipelines. This role will lead best-practice implementation for new project setup, container orchestration, release strategies, observability, and production support across our Financial Markets technology landscape.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Automation

• Lead the design, setup, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes-based platforms for new and existing projects
• Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines to enable secure, repeatable, and reliable software delivery at scale
• Drive automation of build, deployment, configuration, and environment provisioning processes using modern DevOps tooling
• Design and own infrastructure-as-code solutions for cloud and on-premise platforms, ensuring consistency and reusability across teams
• Continuously improve deployment efficiency, environment consistency, scalability, and operational resilience across multiple applications and platforms

Technical Excellence

• Set and champion engineering best practices for automation, observability, reliability, security, and maintainability
• Lead design reviews, operational readiness reviews, and drive continuous improvement of engineering practices across the team
• Define and implement automated testing, quality gates, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks within delivery pipelines
• Evaluate and introduce emerging DevOps, cloud, containerisation, and platform engineering practices to the organisation

Collaboration & Communication

• Partner closely with application developers, SRE, QA, product managers, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to align on delivery and platform strategy
• Own technical documentation, runbooks, knowledge sharing, and operational handover activities
• Mentor and coach engineers on DevOps practices, automation standards, release governance, and operational excellence

Quality & Compliance

• Ensure delivery pipelines, environments, and operational processes meet security standards and regulatory requirements
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting, logging, and incident response practices to improve service availability and recovery
• Lead performance, capacity, resiliency, and disaster recovery improvements for critical applications and platforms

Skills and Experience

• Kubernetes Platform Engineering
• CI/CD Pipeline Engineering
• Infrastructure as Code
• Containerisation and Orchestration
• Cloud and Platform Operations
• Observability and Incident Response
• DevSecOps and Release Governance

Qualifications

Technical Skills

• 5-10 years of experience in DevOps, platform engineering, release engineering, SRE, or infrastructure automation

• Strong hands-on Kubernetes experience, including workloads, networking, storage, security, and troubleshooting

• Experience setting up new application projects and defining platform onboarding best practices
• Strong knowledge of deployment strategies such as rolling, blue/green, and canary releases
• Strong, hands-on experience with CI/CD platforms and source control practices, including Git-based workflows

• Advanced proficiency in scripting and automation using tools such as Shell, Python, PowerShell, or Groovy

• Proven experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar

• Strong working knowledge of containerisation and orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes or OpenShift

• Solid understanding of cloud platforms, Linux systems, networking fundamentals, security controls, and enterprise infrastructure patterns
• Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or AppDynamics
• Strong knowledge of automated testing, release governance, vulnerability scanning, and change management practices

Professional Skills

• Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking abilities
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Attention to detail and commitment to quality
• Proactive approach to learning and professional development

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field
• Banking or financial services domain knowledge advantageous

Preferred Requirements

• Experience supporting highly available, business-critical applications in banking or financial services
• Experience with site reliability engineering practices, incident management, service-level objectives, and production readiness
• Cloud, Kubernetes, security, or DevOps certifications are advantageous

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.