We're working with an established, market-leading platform business in a high-volume, security-critical space. Real commercial momentum, a growing enterprise base, and genuine investment behind the next phase of platform maturity.

This is the role driving that phase.

You'll take an already-strong, senior infrastructure team — including a Principal DBA with deep specialist expertise — through the biggest shift the engineering function has made: from a DevOps team that deploys on behalf of others, to a platform team that hands delivery squads the self-service tooling to deploy themselves.

The direction is already set off the back of an independent capability review — so you're not starting from a blank page, and you're not inheriting a vacuum. You're stepping into well-scoped, high-leverage work with a capable team behind you. The only question is whether you can deliver it.

This role is NOT:

• A people-manager who's hung up the keyboard
• An on-call firefighter lurching between incidents with no plan to kill them off
• A classic DevOps lead booking deployments for developers
• A roadmap consultant who never ships

This role IS:

• A platform leader who sets the bar for "good infrastructure" with the team — then builds to it
• A senior practitioner who'll review Terraform, untangle a pipeline, jump on an incident bridge and write the runbook when that's the quickest way to set the standard
• A leader who backs the strength already in the team, clears the friction, and builds the structure for it to scale
• A guild chair who lands consistent standards across squads that don't report to you

What You'll Own

• Platform roadmap — an agreed 12-month direction across self-service deployment, IaC maturity, observability and environment consistency. A direction, not a backlog
• Production reliability — operational health across a mixed Azure VM and AKS estate sitting on a substantial SQL Server platform
• Deployment automation — fully automated, low-risk production releases with dependable rollback across the estate
• Self-service delivery — squads shipping to non-prod and prod without raising a ticket. You design the path, build the tooling, and steer the culture change on both sides
• Reliability & on-call — SLOs in place, a formal rota with clear ownership, and post-incident reviews whose actions genuinely close out
• IaC discipline — every change reviewed, tested and version-controlled; drift caught and fixed, never left to pile up
• Cost & capacity — own the Azure spend, right-sizing, reserved-instance strategy and capacity planning; deliver a measurable FinOps win
• Security & compliance execution — patching SLAs, access reviews, regulated-environment obligations
• Infrastructure Guild — you chair it, and it's the channel that turns your standards into shared practice
• Knowledge capture — getting deep operational know-how out of heads and into docs, pairing and cross-training so the team is resilient, not reliant on one person

Nice to Have

• Background in a regulated, payments-heavy or downtime-sensitive domain
• SQL Server at scale — not as a DBA, but you get backups, patching, availability groups and multi-TB performance
• Led a real cloud cost-reduction / FinOps programme
• Moved a team from a deployment-service model to true platform engineering
• SRE background or cert — Google SRE thinking as your reliability framework
• Turned an external technical review into a delivered improvement programme

What Good Looks Like at 6 Months

• Clear momentum on the strategic programme, deployment automation live with rollback, a published 12-month roadmap, on-call formalised, at least one squad self-serving deployments, SLOs defined, the Guild up and running, and the team's expertise visibly spreading through pairing and cross-training.

If you're a senior infrastructure leader who still loves being in the code and the pipelines — and you want to own a high-impact platform programme end-to-end on a 12-month contract — get in touch for a fast response. Moving quickly. 🚀