Lead DevOps Engineer (Azure, SQL Server, Windows)

Lead DevOps Engineer | Azure, SQL Server, Windows | SaaS Product

• Salary: £80,000-£90,000 + Benefits
• Location: Remote-first; monthly all-hands in Cambridgeshire

Our client is a B2B transport SaaS business that has been building and running operational software for its customers for over 20 years. They have two products used by thousands of clients across the UK, and a tech team of 12 sitting inside a company of around 40. Two development squads work across the two products, and a 3 person infrastructure/DevOps team sits alongside them. Those three engineers know the platform well but have been without a senior technical lead nor complex ‘DevOps’ experience.

You'd come in as the most senior person in the infrastructure team, reporting to the CTO and taking on the line management of those three engineers. It's 60-80% hands-on - they're not looking for a pure manager - but you'd also be the one setting direction, defining what good looks like, and challenging how the team deploys and operates its workloads.

The environment is Azure-based and in the middle of a meaningful transformation. They started as a lift-and-shift onto Azure VMs and are actively working through a multi-phase refactor: consolidating SQL Server VMs onto Azure SQL, building out disaster recovery, and progressively moving workloads into Kubernetes. One product is already live on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) across two regions, with the plan to bring the second along the same path over time. They also need someone to introduce proper observability and monitoring - knowing when things aren't running, alerting the right people, and building the kind of visibility that lets the team respond rather than react.

Non-Negotiables

• Azure - hands-on production experience
• Windows Server
• Microsoft SQL Server

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• Line management experience, or clear readiness to step into it as you’ll be leading 3 other engineers

What You'll Work With

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - two clusters across two regions
• Azure SQL - active migration from SQL Server on VM
• Windows VMs and RDP session host infrastructure (being deprecated over the next 12-18 months)
• CI/CD tooling and working with the development team
• Observability and monitoring tooling - currently limited; you'd shape this
• Disaster recovery architecture
• MFC C++, .NET services, Angular front-end (context for the broader dev estate)

Nice to Haves

• IaC experience
• Background in migrating VM-based workloads to cloud-native or containerised architectures

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• Azure Monitor, Application Insights, or equivalent observability tools
• Experience in SME or product-led tech businesses

Why Join

The honest pitch here is ownership. This team hasn't had a senior DevOps lead who could set architecture direction - an external consultant has been filling the gap alongside a team who know the product well but are less sure what best practice looks like for the infrastructure. You'd be the person who defines that. The projects are genuinely interesting: a real Kubernetes migration, active database consolidation, and building observability from scratch in an environment that's been running lean. It's not a greenfield, but the scope for improvement is real and the CTO wants someone to drive it, not just maintain what's there.

The team is fully distributed, with people across the country from Brighton to Manchester. The one fixed point is a monthly all-hands day in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, which has a social element alongside the work - recent team events have included an F1 experience in London. If you're further afield, travel and overnight costs are covered. The CTO is in the office Monday to Thursday for those who want more face time, but that's a preference rather than a requirement.

Employee Benefits

• 24 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Life assurance
• Pension
• Death in service

Lead DevOps Engineer | Azure, SQL Server, Windows | SaaS Product