Lead DevOps Engineer (Contract, Outside IR35)

Contract: Outside IR35
Start date: December 2026
Length: Three months initially, with a chance to extend
Location: Remote first, based within 50 miles of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester or London

A lot of DevOps contracts drop you into someone else's setup and ask you to keep it running. On this one, you'll decide how it's built.

What's in it for you

You'll lead the DevOps work from day one, with the authority to make decisions and see them through.

You'll join a team that already knows what good looks like, so you won't spend your first month untangling things.

Who you'll be doing it for

You'll be working for hedgehog lab, a digital product consultancy with 20 years of experience. We're around 100 people, B Corp and Great Place to Work certified, and backed by a growth capital investor.

Your clients will be public and private sector organisations going through digital transformation, from moving to a new tech stack to building an AI platform from scratch. They include retail, health tech and financial services businesses.

You'll sit in a project team of 5 to 15 people, alongside agentic engineers, software engineers, QA and designers.

What you'll be doing

You'll design and run AWS infrastructure for products built in TypeScript, Node and Python.

You'll build and improve the CI/CD pipelines that let teams release often and safely, and manage it all as code so environments stay secure, monitored and cost effective.

You'll talk client stakeholders through technical decisions, and guide other engineers on DevOps practice.

You'll come into an office or client site for important meetings, workshops and key moments.

What you'll need

You'll have hands-on AWS experience in production, and be comfortable with infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform.

You'll know CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI, plus containers and orchestration such as Docker, ECS or Kubernetes.

You'll have led DevOps work or guided other engineers, and you'll be confident talking to clients and non-technical stakeholders.

Apply

If you're free from December and want to own the platform, apply below and we'll be in touch.