Operations Engineering Lead

Ready to shape the infrastructure that powers engineering at scale?

As our Engineering Lead - Infrastructure Operations, you'll lead the AWS platforms operations, tooling, and operations that keep our teams shipping safely and efficiently.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.
Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here - https://www.cushon.co.uk/about 

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead - Infrastructure Operations to provide technical leadership for our AWS-based platform operations team. You will play a key role in scaling our engineering foundations, modernising infrastructure, and leading cloud and platform migration initiatives. You'll help shape the hosting, security, release, observability, and developer tooling capabilities that enable engineering teams to deliver securely and reliably at scale. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

This is a hybrid role requiring working one to two days per month from the office.

The Role

Delivery & technical leadership

• Lead delivery of complex infrastructure and platform initiatives, managing dependencies& removing blockers.
• Define and evolve the DevOps and infrastructure strategy, ownership model, and team boundaries.
• Partner with engineering teams to deliver reliable, high-quality solutions aligned with business and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with Engineering Leads to drive innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Build strong relationships across product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders.
• Enhance engineering practices across CI/CD, releases, incident management, and operational readiness.
• Balance delivery priorities with technical debt, security requirements, and operational responsibilities.
• Foster collaboration and alignment on shared platform and infrastructure initiatives.

Infrastructure, reliability & security

• Lead the evolution of deployment pipelines and system reliability across our monorepos and legacy platform (CircleCI, NX, Docker)
• Guide AWS cloud strategy - hosting, networking, scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency across production environments
• Oversee Infrastructure as Code practices (e.g. Terraform) and ensure environments are consistent, auditable, and secure
• Shape monitoring, observability and alerting across the engineering organisation (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch) so issues are detected and resolved before customers are impacted4
• Lead incident management practices - on-call, triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook qualityChampion security best practices - IAM, WAF, encryption, VPC configuration, and compliance with industry and regulatory standards
• Support capacity planning, cost optimisation, and production readiness for high-risk changes and coordinated cutovers

People & developer experience

• Coach and mentor Operations Engineers, fostering technical leadership, delivery excellence, and strong operational practices.
• Remain hands-on when needed, contributing to designs, code, configuration, and runbooks while empowering the team to take ownership.
• Enhance developer experience through self-service tools, streamlined environments, improved documentation, and effective onboarding.
• Support hiring efforts and help raise the bar for engineering talent across the team.