Lead DevOps Engineer

Lead DevOps Engineer | Azure & People Management | Global Market Intelligence Business Mid-Transformation

• Salary: €69,000 - €85,000 + 15% annual bonus
• Location: Sofia, Bulgaria (hybrid, 2 days in the office per month)

This team is full of strong cloud engineers, people who can work out the best way to do almost anything in Azure, Kubernetes or GitHub. What they're missing is someone to run the day to day: to plan the next three months, decide who's working on what today, and handle the stakeholder who's kicking off about something. That's the gap you'll fill. You'll report straight to the Cloud Engineering Manager and take that side of things off his plate so he can focus on the longer-term architecture. It's a global market intelligence and data business, and the technology function is going through a serious modernisation programme: a big move to Kubernetes, a migration to GitHub Actions, and a push to full Infrastructure as Code. The aim is the Nirvana of DevOps. The honest caveat is there's plenty of legacy to clear out along the way, so you'll want to enjoy the tidy-up as much as the greenfield.

You'll line-manage a team of three to four engineers, from juniors up to seniors. Your job is to get the best out of them: run the three-week sprints, keep everyone unblocked, build out the backlog, and make sure clever people aren't disappearing down the wrong rabbit hole. You'll take the architecture decisions your manager and the architects have already agreed and make them happen, then flag it clearly and early when something can't be delivered as planned.

This is not a hands-off management role. Around half your time is spent delivering technically alongside the team. The other half is the management, planning and stakeholder work. You'll also need the confidence to push back: to tell a stakeholder to stop when something's wrong and steer it back on track, rather than quietly carrying on. If that side of the job appeals as much as the tech, you'll do well here.

What They're Looking For:

• Azure infrastructure (hands-on)
• DevOps and CI/CD
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Leading or line-managing engineers
• Stakeholder management and near-term planning
• Confidence to push back and say no when it's the right call

What You'll Work With:

• Kubernetes (K8s)
• GitHub Actions
• Three-week sprint cycles
• A team of three to four engineers, juniors to seniors
• In-house scrum leads

Nice to Haves:

• Data ops or AI ops exposure
• Agile / sprint delivery experience

Why Join? The modernisation programme is the real draw: Kubernetes at scale, the GitHub Actions migration and a full move to Infrastructure as Code, with a clear mandate to build things properly. You'll sit as a direct peer to the SRE lead, and the two teams work closely, moving resources between them to get projects over the line. At the start you'll also pick up data and AI ops, since that work sits in the same backlog for now, which gives you exposure across cloud, data and AI.

Longer term there's genuine room to grow as the function builds out its leadership.

Happy to talk through the detail before you apply, so get in touch and I'll give you a call.

Lead DevOps Engineer | Azure & People Management | Global Market Intelligence Business Mid-Transformation