DevOps Lead

About Us:

Clear Route is an engineering consultancy bridging Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms and Developer Experience. We help enterprises reliably bring high-impact digital products to market faster, cheaper, and safer, working with technology leaders facing complex business challenges.

We take as much pride in our people, culture and work-life balance as we do in making better software. We’re not just making better software. We’re making the making of software better. Collaborative, entrepreneurial and dedicated to problem solving, we bring the step change our customer need to sustain innovation. Our values challenge us to do the best we can for Clear Route, our customers and most importantly our team.

This is an opportunity for you to build the organisation from the ground up, use your voice to drive change and help transform organisations and problem domains.

Senior Dev Ops leader responsible for owning the end-to-end delivery pipeline and toolchain governance across the agentic development programme.

Acts as the connective tissue between the platform engineering layer and application delivery teams, ensuring both move at pace within consistent, auditable standards.

Central authority on CI/CD standards, Git Hub-based workflow design, and the governance framework for AI-assisted developer tooling across 120+ engineers.

Works across Platform Engineers and Lead Engineers to maintain integrated pipelines, shared standards, and a coherent delivery operating model as the programme scales.

Operates in a matrixed enterprise environment with a high degree of autonomy, expected to define and enforce standards, not simply follow them.

• Define and own CI/CD pipeline standards across both platform and application work streams, ensuring consistency, security, and repeatability at programme scale.
• Design and implement governance frameworks for developer desktop AI tools — covering usage policies, guardrails, audit trails, and compliance controls; integrate delivery workflows with existing Git Hub-based skills marketplace and wider Dev Ops toolchain.
• Embed automated testing, security scanning, drift detection, and compliance checks directly into all delivery pipelines across the programme.
• Proactively identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks across 10‑12 engineering teams, bridging technical and organisational blockers to keep momentum.

• Proven Dev Ops leadership across multiple teams in an enterprise environment — owning and enforcing delivery standards, not just implementing pipelines.
• Advanced Git Hub Actions experience including reusable workflow design, centralised deployment logic, and cross‑repository governance at scale.
• Strong AWS Dev Ops experience — deploying, operating, and governing services on AWS with a security and compliance mindset.
• Demonstrable experience governing developer tooling — policies, guardrails, and audit approaches that extend credibly to AI and agentic development tools.
• Security and compliance integration within CI/CD pipelines — scanning, policy enforcement, and drift detection embedded as standard practice.

• Hands‑on experience with agentic editors (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) in a team delivery context — sufficient to govern their use and define appropriate guardrails.
• Prior experience in financial services or a regulated environment where audit trails, change control, and governance are non‑negotiable.
• Background bridging platform engineering and application delivery teams — comfortable operating across both layers and translating between them.
• Familiarity with skills marketplace, API catalogue, or developer portal governance — relevant to the Git Hub‑based marketplace James Brown's team has already built.
• Experience supporting the onboarding of large engineering cohorts onto new tooling or ways of working — directly applicable to the 120+ engineer scaling challenge.

At Clear Route, we believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes, and inclusion creates the conditions for everyone to thrive. We are proud to have built a family friendly working environment and have many employees who have caring responsibilities alongside work. We welcome applications from people who require flexibility and will be happy to discuss needs on an individual basis.

We are committed to fostering a culture where all team members feel respected, supported, and empowered to do their best work. We celebrate individuality and our differences and understand that some differences may mean that you require changes made to the interview process. We are happy to cater to your needs to make the interview accessible, if this is something you require please let us know by emailing us at join.