Lead DevOps Engineer (AWS) at Methods, Remote, £550 per day

Daily rate: £550 inside IR35

Duration: toward end of Jan 2027

Location: remote

Overview

The role is heavily AWS platform engineering focused. While Azure and DevSecOps experience are valuable, the day-to-day work is centred on designing, maintaining and improving AWS-hosted Identity platforms running on Kubernetes and ECS.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will be expected to lead by example, mentor engineers, influence technical decisions and own services throughout their lifecycle.

Technical Ownership

Lead Engineers are expected to take ownership of services rather than simply deliver individual pieces of work.

This includes:

• Owning services throughout their lifecycle, from design through to production support
• Understanding the wider platform and the impact of technical decisions
• Driving work forward with minimal supervision
• Identifying technical debt and proposing practical improvements
• Challenging designs where there are operational, security, resilience or scalability concerns
• Considering operational support as part of every solution
• Designing solutions that are maintainable by the wider engineering team
• Working across multiple repositories and services
• Being accountable for the quality of technical delivery
• Supporting incident investigation and root cause analysis through to completion

Skillsets:

• The team follows Agile delivery practices and Lead Engineers are expected to actively contribute to both technical delivery and the running of the team.
• Lead Engineers are expected to help create an environment where knowledge is shared, engineering standards are maintained and the team continues to improve its ways of working.
• Leadership Expectations
• Technical leadership is as important as technical delivery.
• The environment is governed by established technology standards, so improvements are generally expected within the approved tooling and architecture rather than introducing alternative products or platforms.

Typical work includes:

• Developing infrastructure using Terraform
• Maintaining reusable Terraform modules
• Developing and maintaining Helm charts
• Supporting and evolving reusable Helm chart libraries
• Deploying services to ECS and EKS
• Supporting the ECS platform
• Writing and maintaining GitLab CI pipelines and reusable pipeline templates
• Writing and maintaining automated tests for infrastructure, platform code and supporting applications
• Integrating automated testing into GitLab CI pipelines
• Investigating and resolving test failures
• Performance, load and stress testing using JMeter and k6
• Supporting production services
• Investigating incidents and performing root cause analysis
• Reviewing merge requests
• Participating in technical design discussions
• Writing and maintaining technical documentation
• Producing Spike investigations and implementation proposals
• Writing Jira stories, technical tasks and Spike tickets
• Improving automation and engineering standards
• Working with application developers to support deployments
• Maintaining AWS platform components
• Mentoring engineers
• Leading Agile ceremonies when required
• Driving continuous improvement across the platform and engineering practices

Technologies Used

• AWS
• ECS
• EKS
• EC2
• Terraform
• Terraform Tests
• Helm
• Go
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• GitLab
• GitLab CI
• Kong API Gateway
• Istio
• OAuth 2.0
• OpenID Connect (OIDC)
• JWT
• IAM
• RBAC
• CloudHSM
• AWS KMS
• Secrets Manager
• Systems Manager Parameter Store
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Dynatrace
• Python
• pytest
• Node.js
• JMeter
• k6