Modern tech stack. Cloud-native platforms. Mature engineering teams. Interesting work. Healthy work/life balance.

If you’re looking for a role where you can work with modern tools, help shape cloud-native platforms at scale, and join a team that combines strong technical expertise with a genuinely supportive culture, this could be a great fit.

At Cencora / PharmaLex, you’ll join mature engineering teams working on meaningful platforms that support global pharma consulting services. You’ll have the opportunity to work on interesting technical challenges, influence platform direction, and drive improvements across infrastructure, delivery, automation, and engineering practices — all within an environment that values collaboration, quality, and sustainable pace.

We are hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own and lead our DevOps capability. This role can be mostly remote in the UK, with monthly travel to our Colchester office.

About the role

This is a leadership role for someone who enjoys broad technical ownership and wants to make a visible impact across a fast-moving engineering estate.

You’ll lead the DevOps function, helping teams ship software faster, safer, and more reliably by evolving our Azure infrastructure, strengthening our CI/CD pipelines, driving automation, and embedding DevOps and shift-left practices across the organisation.

A key part of this role is our heavily Kubernetes-based environment. We are looking for someone with strong, hands-on Kubernetes and containerisation experience in production, who can lead confidently in an organisation where Kubernetes is a core part of the platform.

Just as importantly, we are looking for someone whose experience shows the right breadth of scope. This role suits somebody who is comfortable supporting many applications and services in a dynamic environment — not someone who has only specialised in one narrow area, and not someone who has moved too far away from hands-on technical leadership.

What you’ll be doing

• Define and drive the DevOps vision using Agile best practices

• Set direction, standards, and engineering best practices for the team

• Lead the design of scalable, secure, and reliable infrastructure and delivery pipelines

• Build, improve, and maintain CI/CD pipelines across multiple applications and services

• Own and evolve Azure-based cloud infrastructure

• Lead in a Kubernetes-first environment, ensuring resilient and scalable platform operations

• Drive automation and advocate for shift-left ways of working

• Align DevOps initiatives with engineering, product, and business goals

• Mentor engineers, support knowledge sharing, and help develop team capability

• Promote high-quality engineering across teams

• Facilitate strong collaboration between technical and non-technical stakeholders

What we’re looking for

Essential

• Significant experince in DevOps, Cloud, or Platform Engineering roles

• Experience in a technical leadership or team lead capacity

• Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure, including VMs, networking, storage, AKS, App Services, and Key Vault

• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience in production

• Strong experience with containerisation in real-world engineering environments

• Strong infrastructure-as-code experience, especially Terraform and Helm

• Strong CI/CD experience, ideally with Azure DevOps

• Coding or scripting ability in at least one of: Golang, Python, PowerShell, or Bash

• Strong understanding of networking, security, and cloud architecture

• Experience working in cross-functional engineering teams

• Familiarity with observability platforms

You’ll likely be a strong fit if you:

• Have experience working across a broad application landscape, rather than in one highly restricted area

• Are comfortable balancing technical leadership with hands-on delivery

• Thrive in a fast-moving environment with multiple applications, services, and priorities

• Have the credibility and experience to lead in a business where Kubernetes is heavily embedded

• Enjoy enabling other engineers and improving the overall developer experience

Nice to have

• Cloudflare / Edge / WAF experience

• LLM experience

Location

Candidates must be based in:

• The United Kingdom, with ability to travel to Colchester occasionally