Lead Operations Engineer / Senior Operations Specialist DevOps London

Lead Operations Engineer / Senior OperationsSpecialist

6 Month Initial Contract (Outside IR35)

Hybrid Working (50% onsite in Farringdon)

Immediate start

We require someone to:

• Own operational oversight for services running on a Java-based microservices platform.
• Act as the primary escalation point for production incidents; lead incident response and communication.
• Drive post-incident reviews (blameless RCAs) and embed learnings through preventive actions.
• Maintain service dashboards, alerts, and incident tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, Datadog).

Technical Expertise required for this engagement:

• Guide operational practices across services built using Java (Spring Boot), Kafka, MongoDB and related technologies.
• Oversee monitoring, observability, and performance tuning using Datadog, ELK, Prometheus, or similar tooling.

Problem Management & Root Cause Elimination required:

• Lead proactive and reactive problem management efforts.
• Identify recurring production issues and collaborate with engineering to design permanent solutions.
• Track and reduce operational toil via automation and tooling improvements.
  

Change Enablement & Service Onboarding:

• Partner with development teams to onboard new services with production readiness standards.
• Ensure all services meet requirements for monitoring, logging, documentation, support, and resilience before go-live.
• Support safe, rapid change practices including canary releases, feature flags, and progressive delivery.
  

Continuous Improvement & DevOps Practices:

• Drive automation and self-service initiatives to reduce manual intervention and operational burden.
• Champion observability best practices (metrics, traces, logs) and error budget tracking.
• Promote DevOps culture and continuous feedback loops between engineering and operations.

Governance, Risk & Compliance:

• Ensure operational processes comply with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001).
• Manage operational risks, service continuity plans, and audit readiness.

If you feel you have the correct skills and experience, are looking for your next engagement and are comfortable working autonomously, click apply!