Lead DevOps Engineer (AI- Focused) Full Time NEW

Lead DevOps Engineer (AI- Focused)

Mandatory hands-on experience supporting AI/ML or GenAI platforms

About Synechron:

Synechron is a leading digital transformation consulting firm dedicated to delivering innovative technology solutions within banking, financial services, and insurance. We thrive on engineering excellence, collaboration, and a passion for cutting-edge technologies.

Job Location: London (Hybrid – 3 days in the office)

Job Summary

Are you passionate about making developers’ lives easier, faster, and more fulfilling? We’re on a mission to supercharge our engineering culture by building a world-class DevOps organization that’s the envy of the industry.

This is a great opportunity to join a growing company in an innovative and dynamic industry!

We are looking for a strong, hands-on Lead DevOps Engineer to build and maintain a brand-new cloud-based Index platform. You will lead a team of Senior and Junior DevOps Engineers to help us build and manage secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud environments, drive observability and resilience through chaos and disaster recovery testing, and implement FinOps strategies to optimize cloud spending. Your expertise will be crucial in ensuring operational excellence and business continuity in a dynamic cloud-native environment. You will also use your deep experience of DevOps CI/CD practices to design, implement and optimize a best-in-class AWS micro services architecture.

We are looking for someone with a strong background in DevOps practices and tools, with a focus on GitLab, Terraform, AWS Cloud, Kubernetes/EKS, and Ansible, along with mandatory experience supporting AI/ML or GenAI platforms in production environments .

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a high-performing, geographically diverse team of DevOps engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, and AI platform reliability .
• Build and oversee the implementation of secure, resilient, and cost-optimized AWS cloud infrastructure, including AI/ML workloads, using best-in-class DevOps practices and technologies.
• Collaborate with software developers across multiple geographies and cross-functional teams to understand project objectives, gather requirements, and deliver sdeliver AI-enabled systems and cloud platforms within agreed timelines.
• Oversee the implementation and management of CI/CD pipelines to streamline software development and deployment processes for Java and Python based Microservices-style architectures .
• Drive infrastructure-as-code maturity through Terraform, enforcing modular, reusable, and version-controlled infrastructure patterns.
• Oversee Kubernetes (EKS) infrastructure at scale, ensuring robust workload orchestration, service discovery, and container life cycle management.
• Lead cloud security posture management by integrating security controls, automated scanning, and continuous compliance into the DevOps life cycle.
• Drive observability efforts using tools like Datadog (or equivalent) to monitor infrastructure and application performance.
• Introduce and lead chaos engineering practices to proactively identify potential points of failure and improve system resilience.
• Oversee and continuously optimize cloud cost management strategies in line with Cloud FinOps principles.
• Design, lead, and continuously improve disaster recovery strategies and testing frameworks to support high availability and business continuity .
• Collaborate with executive leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to align infrastructure strategy with long-term business objectives.
• Ensure code is up-to-date, maintainable, scalable, and secure.
• Mentor senior DevOps engineers and promote a culture of continuous improvement and cloud operational excellence.
• Stay updated on industry best practices and emerging technologies in DevOps and Cloud.
• Stay updated on cloud technologies, security vulnerabilities, and emerging FinOps methodologies.
• This is not just a People Management role, and requires you to be completely hands-on.

Must Have Skills:

• Mandatory hands-on experience supporting AI/ML or GenAI platforms in production environments, including infrastructure required for model training, inference, and deployment.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS Cloud services: EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, EKS/ECS, and services commonly used for AI/ML workloads.
• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, including AI/ML and data platform infrastructure.
• Deep hands-on experience with CI/CD tools (GitLab CI, Jenkins, etc.) for Java, Python, and AI/ML pipelines.
• Proven leadership experience within a DevOps, Platform, or Cloud Engineering team, with hands-on delivery responsibility.
• Strong expertise in AWS architecture best practices, including scaling, security, and reliability for AI workloads.
• Strong experience managing Kubernetes clusters (preferably EKS), including containerized AI/ML and data processing workloads.
• Solid understanding of cloud and AI security best practices, including IAM, encryption, secrets management, data privacy, and compliance.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, or equivalent, including monitoring of AI pipelines and model-serving infrastructure .
• Familiarity with Cloud FinOps, including cost optimization strategies for compute-intensive AI workloads.
• Proven experience designing and executing disaster recovery and resilience strategies.
• Strong Scripting skills in Python, Bash, Ansible, or similar (Python strongly preferred, especially for AI automation).
• Experience with automated testing, infrastructure testing, and validation of AI pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work collaboratively across engineering, data, and product teams.

Nice to Have Skills

• AWS Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified DevOps Engineer or equivalent.
• Practical experience with chaos engineering methodologies and tools.
• Experience with other cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) for hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
• Experience working in a regulated or high-availability environment (eg, fintech, financial services or capital markets).
• Passion for open-source technologies and contributions to the DevOps community.
• Bonus Skills
• Experience working in areas of Equity or Fixed Income and a working knowledge of Benchmarks and Indices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of experience in engineering roles, with at least 5+ years in senior DevOps leadership positions including responsibility for AI-enabled platforms .

Diversity Statement

Synechron are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative Same Difference’ is committed to fostering an inclusive culture – promoting equality, diversity and an environment that is respectful to all. We encourage applicants from across diverse backgrounds, race, ethnicities, religion, age, marital status, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities to apply. We offer flexible workplace arrangements, mentoring, internal mobility, learning and development programmes to support our global workforce. Empowerment and collaboration are at the core of how we operate.

All employment decisions at Synechron are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to the applicant’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.