Development/Operations Manager

Development & Operations Manager — Sovereign AI Defence

Location:
North West England (Manchester / Liverpool corridor – hybrid, UK citizenship required)

Salary:
Up to
£70,000
+ pension + security clearance support

Type:
Permanent, full-time

Sector:
Defence
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cloud Infrastructure

Reports to:
Head of Engineering / CTO

About the Company:

|

My client is a UK sovereign AI company developing
secure, mission-critical artificial intelligence and data platforms
for defence, national security, and strategic industry partners.

Our systems operate at the intersection of
real-time data, autonomous decision support, and cloud-native infrastructure
, with a strong emphasis on
security, integrity, and performance
.

We're scaling rapidly and seeking a
hands-on Development & Operations Manager
to lead the delivery and uptime of our AI cloud systems across AWS.

As
Development & Operations Manager
, you'll bridge
software engineering
,
DevOps
, and
cloud operations
, ensuring secure, compliant, and high-availability environments for our AI workloads.

You'll lead a small cross-functional team, manage deployment pipelines, automate processes, and enforce defence-grade reliability and observability standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage
  a small team (developers + DevOps engineers) delivering secure, scalable, and high-availability AI systems.
• Own
  AWS-based infrastructure
  : Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation/Terraform, CloudWatch, and VPC security.
• Oversee
  JSON-based API integrations
  , data pipelines, and serverless event-driven architectures.
• Implement
  continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD)
  pipelines for code, models, and infrastructure.
• Ensure
  DevSecOps best practices
  — patching, logging, monitoring, and compliance with UK MoD or ISO27001 frameworks.
• Manage
  incident response, uptime SLAs
  , and operational dashboards.
• Collaborate with software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists to optimise cloud performance.
• Maintain documentation and enforce
  secure coding and deployment standards
  .
• Support accreditation, audits, and readiness for
  UK sovereign hosting environments
  (IL2–IL5).
• Report directly to the Head of Engineering / CTO on delivery metrics, operational risks, and team performance.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong experience managing
  AWS
  environments — Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudFormation, IAM, CloudWatch.
• Hands-on with
  Python
  ,
  JSON
  , and
  serverless architectures
  .
• Deep understanding of
  CI/CD
  (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline).
• Proven ability to
  secure and scale
  production systems.
• Monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Familiar with
  data exchange formats (JSON, YAML, Parquet)
  and API design.

Leadership & Delivery

• 4–8 years in
  software development and/or DevOps
  , including 2+ in a
  management or team lead
  role.
• Experience in
  defence, aerospace, or regulated sectors
  preferred.
• Strong communicator with ability to translate technical ops into business risk and vice versa.
• Comfortable managing
  multi-disciplinary teams
  (developers, data, infra).
• Passion for
  secure AI infrastructure
  and
  UK sovereignty in technology
  .

Security & Eligibility

• UK citizenship required
• Must be eligible to work in the UK without restrictions.
• Understanding of
  data classification and handling protocols
  desirable.

We Offer

• Up to
  £70,000
  base salary + bens

Ideal Backgrounds

• DevOps or Engineering Manager in
  defence
  ,
  cybersecurity
  , or
  AI infrastructure
  startup
• Cloud Infrastructure Lead within
  AWS Partner
  or
  SaaS provider
• Senior DevOps/Software Engineer ready to take on team management and delivery ownership