[Hiring] Staff DevOps Engineer @tem

Role Description

We’re hiring a Staff DevOps Engineer to lead our DevOps team — one of three specialist teams inside our Platform Service group. Platform Service exists to make engineering at tem move faster and safer. The DevOps team sits at the heart of that: owning the infrastructure, security posture, and tooling that lets our engineering teams build and ship with confidence. This role is the technical and operational lead for that team.

You’ll report into the Engineering Manager for Platform Service. Day-to-day, you’ll work closely with and under the guidance of the Platform Service Lead — a senior technical role that sets the overarching technical direction for the whole service. You’ll also collaborate closely with the Team Leads for DevEx and QA to manage dependencies and keep the service coherent.

In your first 12 months, you’ll establish the operational rhythm of the team, close the most critical infrastructure gaps, and start shifting our engineering culture toward self-serve infrastructure ownership. Our core metrics to measure success here are DORA supplemented by tools like GetDX and Vanta — it’s your role to call out what metrics are the right ones for us to look at!

Responsibilities

• Drive adoption of team deliverables:
  • Actively champion the tools, standards, and practices the team ships.
  • Remove friction to adoption, run enablement sessions where needed, and track whether the work is landing.
• Gather and translate stakeholder requirements:
  • Work closely with engineers, team leads, and service owners across the organisation before the team builds.
  • Understand the real infrastructure pain points, translate them into clear requirements, and ensure the backlog reflects actual needs — not assumptions.
• Lead the team’s delivery:
  • Own the backlog.
  • Prioritise across competing demands — KTLO, incident response, internal initiatives, and cross-service projects — with a clear rationale and a steady hand.
• Manage capacity deliberately:
  • Find the right balance between reactive and proactive work.
  • Protect space for high-leverage improvements, not just firefighting.
• Set technical direction:
  • Make architectural decisions on infrastructure and security, and hold the team to a high standard in execution.
• Enable other engineers:
  • Design tools, patterns, and guardrails that let product engineering teams own their infrastructure — easily and securely — without creating dependencies on DevOps.
• Collaborate across Platform Service:
  • Work closely with the Platform Service Lead and the Team Leads for DevEx and QA to manage shared dependencies, align priorities, and keep the service coherent.
• Contribute hands-on:
  • Write and review infrastructure code. You’re a practitioner first.
• Drive incident response and reliability:
  • Own the approach to incident management, MTTR reduction, and operational health across our distributed environment.

Qualifications

• A track record of driving adoption of internal tooling or platform work — gathering requirements from engineering stakeholders, shaping the backlog around real needs, and making sure what the team ships actually gets used.
• Proven experience as a Staff or Senior DevOps / Platform / Infrastructure Engineer in a high-growth environment.
• Deep expertise in managing distributed, microservice, event-driven architectures — from both an infrastructure and security perspective.
• Strong AWS experience. Your deepest cloud experience doesn’t have to be AWS, but you’ll need to get productive here quickly — familiarity with leading cloud providers (GCP, Azure) and serverless patterns will transfer.
• Experience with serverless infrastructure — Lambda, API Gateway, and equivalents.
• Scripting skills are a must. Comfort in at least one language: Python, Node.js, Bash, or similar.
• A track record of managing delivery processes — backlog design, capacity planning, dependency management.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills. You’ll work across teams and need to influence without authority.

Requirements

• Hands-on Python or Node.js experience beyond scripting.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tooling — Terraform, Terragrunt, or similar.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-serve tooling for engineering teams.
• Background in security-focused infrastructure design (IAM, secrets management, network controls).
• Exposure to DORA metrics and DevEx improvement programmes.

Benefits

• Competitive salary - our current band for this role is £101,000 or equivalent in local currency.
• We review salaries twice a year using real-time market data, with transparent, consistent pay for the same role and level.
• Stock Options - everyone on the team has ownership in our mission.
• 25 days holiday + public holidays - Swap public holidays for ones that matter most to you. Plus, get an extra day off for your birthday 🎉.
• Remote & flexible working - We’re fully remote with clear core hours, and no internal meetings on Friday afternoons.
• Home working & wellbeing budgets:
  • Up to £1,200 / €1,200 annually to upgrade your remote setup (co-working passes, equipment, etc.).
  • Up to £150 / €150 monthly on anything that supports your wellbeing - from therapy to gym memberships to meditation apps.

Interview Process

• Our processes normally take around 2-3 weeks from first call to offer - please let us know about any adjustments to timelines that may be required.
• First call with our Talent Team (30 Mins) - This is to understand your experience, motivations, and discuss the role in more detail.
• Behaviour Interview with our Engineering Managers (60 Mins) - This is your chance to really understand the role, the expectations, and ensure alignment on ways of working.
• Technical Interview with the Team (90 Mins) - You’ll meet with potential peers in this session and will discuss technical topics and experiences.
• Culture-Add Interview with Stakeholders (45 Mins) - The final session will be with two cross-functional stakeholders, and will explore how your values align with ours, and is designed to be a genuine two-way conversation, your chance to understand what it’s really like to work at tem.