Job Title

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 . Were 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 , youll bridge s oftware engineering , DevOps , and cloud operations , ensuring secure, compliant, and high-availability environments for our AI workloads. Youll 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 (IL2IL5). 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 48 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 TPBN1_UKTJ