DevSecOps Architect; Director level

Reference: 51367

Director, Dev Sec Ops  Architect
London, Hybrid, 3 days per week on-site
110,000 to 135,000 base + variable bonus

A leading financial services organisation is looking for a senior Dev Sec Ops  Architect to define and drive the target-state architecture for how software is built, tested, secured and released across its engineering estate.

This is a senior transformation role with an immediate focus on test automation, alongside CI/CD standardisation, security automation, developer productivity and the adoption of AI-assisted software engineering.

Key Responsibilities Define the target-state CI/CD and Dev Sec Ops  architecture, covering build standards, branching, artefact management, environment promotion, deployment, release and rollback.

Drive convergence of fragmented engineering tool chains onto a common paved-road engineering platform, with a clear approach for modernising legacy pipelines.

Own the test automation strategy across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance and resilience testing.

Define test data management, automation coverage and quality gates, embedding automated testing directly into release decisions.

Drive shift-left testing, service virtualisation and greater automation across complex engineering environments.

Embed automated security controls including SAST, DAST, SCA, container/IaC scanning, secrets detection and SBOM generation into delivery pipelines.

Establish policy-as-code, software supply chain security and automated compliance evidence, reducing manual controls and improving auditability.

Define architecture and guardrails for AI-assisted software engineering, including coding assistants, agentic development, automated code review and AI-generated testing.

Help establish the lifecycle and control framework for production AI/ML and LLM systems, including evaluation, deployment, monitoring, governance and rollback.

Experience Significant experience architecting CI/CD, Dev Sec Ops  and engineering platforms at enterprise scale within a regulated environment.

Proven delivery of a test automation strategy that has materially improved software quality, release frequency or defect escape rates.

Strong software engineering background with credibility across development, architecture and platform engineering teams.

Strong knowledge of modern testing approaches and tooling such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, JUnit/pytest, Pact, JMeter or k6.Deep practical experience integrating security controls into CI/CD, including SAST/DAST/SCA, secrets management and software supply chain security.

Strong experience across Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab and/or Jenkins, alongside Kubernetes, containers and Terraform.

Experience modernising complex or legacy engineering estates and driving adoption of common engineering standards.

Hands-on exposure to AI/ML, LLM systems or AI-assisted engineering would be highly relevant.

Strong senior stakeholder management with the ability to influence engineering direction and drive adoption across multiple technology teams.