My client is a UK sovereign AI company developing secure, mission-critical artificial intelligence and data platforms for defence, national security, and strategic industry partners.
Our systems operate at the intersection of Real Time data, autonomous decision support, and cloud-native infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on security, integrity, and performance.
They are scaling rapidly and seeking a hands-on Development & Operations Manager to lead the delivery and uptime of our AI cloud systems across AWS.
I need a JSON/AWS/Lambda Developer to bridge software engineering, DevOps, and cloud operations, ensuring secure, compliant, and high-availability environments for our AI workloads.
You'll lead a small cross-functional team, manage deployment pipelines, automate processes, and enforce defence-grade reliability and observability standards.
Key Responsibilities
Lead and manage a small team (developers + DevOps engineers) delivering secure, scalable, and high-availability AI systems.
Own AWS-based infrastructure: Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation/Terraform, CloudWatch, and VPC security.
Oversee JSON-based API integrations, data pipelines, and serverless event-driven architectures.
Implement continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for code, models, and infrastructure.
Ensure DevSecOps best practices - patching, logging, monitoring, and compliance with UK MoD or ISO27001 frameworks.
Manage incident response, uptime SLAs, and operational dashboards.
Collaborate with software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists to optimise cloud performance.
Maintain documentation and enforce secure coding and deployment standards.
Support accreditation, audits, and readiness for UK sovereign hosting environments (IL2-IL5).
Report directly to the Head of Engineering/CTO on delivery metrics, operational risks, and team performance.
Required Skills & Experience
Strong experience managing AWS environments - Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation, IAM, CloudWatch.
Hands-on with Python, JSON, and serverless architectures.
Deep understanding of CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline).
Proven ability to secure and scale production systems.
Monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
Familiar with data exchange formats (JSON, YAML, Parquet) and API design.
Leadership & Delivery
4-8 years in software development and/or DevOps, including 2+ in a management or team lead role.
Experience in defence, aerospace, or regulated sectors preferred.
Strong communicator with ability to translate technical ops into business risk and vice versa.
Comfortable managing multi-disciplinary teams (developers, data, infra).
Passion for secure AI infrastructure and UK sovereignty in technology.
Security & Eligibility
UK citizenship required
Must be eligible to work in the UK without restrictions.
Understanding of data classification and handling protocols desirable.
Ideal Backgrounds
DevOps or Engineering Manager in defence, cybersecurity, or AI infrastructure startup
Cloud Infrastructure Lead within AWS Partner or SaaS provider
Senior DevOps/Software Engineer ready to take on team management and delivery ownership
Please let me know if this role is of interest.
THE RIGHT CANDIDATE MUST BE A UK CITIZEN