DevOps Lead

About Newton Russell

Newton Russell builds the future of risk and compliance for financial services. Our platform, Brontë, powers critical risk and compliance workflows across banking, insurance and broader financial services. We move fast. We build in person. We back our people to do their best work.

Why this role exists

Brontë runs live risk monitoring, knowledge graphs, automated control testing and AI-assisted decisioning inside regulated financial institutions. That means our infrastructure carries a different weight than most startups': downtime, a bad deployment or a weak control is a client's compliance problem, not just ours.

We're looking for a DevOps Lead to own that layer end-to-end. You'll take infrastructure from where it is today to a multi-tenant, multi-region platform that ships daily, recovers fast, and stands up to enterprise security review without slowing engineers down.

This is a hands-on lead role. You'll write the Terraform, own the GitHub Actions & AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild pipelines, carry the pager and set the standards the engineering team builds against. As we scale, you'll build the team beneath you.

What you'll do

Infrastructure and cloud

• Own AWS infrastructure end-to-end architecture, provisioning, networking, cost and capacity across development, staging and production.

• Define and maintain everything as code (Terraform / IaC), so environments are reproducible, reviewable and disposable.

• Design for multi-tenancy, tenant isolation and multi-region deployment as we expand across APAC, Europe and North America.

• Own containerisation and orchestration (Docker, ECS/EKS), including scaling behaviour for AI and data workloads.

CI/CD and developer experience

• Own build, test and deployment pipelines end-to-end; make deploys boring, frequent and reversible.

• Design quality gates for an AI-native SDLC - where a meaningful share of code is AI-authored - covering automated testing, security scanning and code provenance.

• Build the golden paths and internal tooling that let engineers ship independently without reinventing infrastructure each time.

Reliability and operations

• Own observability across the platform: monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and on-call practice.

• Define SLOs and error budgets, run incident response, and drive blameless postmortems into permanent fixes.

• Own backup, disaster recovery and business continuity, and prove they work through regular testing.

• Manage the cost profile of the platform, including cost per inference and per transaction as consumption grows.

Security and compliance

• Own the platform's security posture - IAM, secrets management, network controls, vulnerability management, dependency hygiene.

• Build and evidence the controls behind certifications and client due diligence (SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration tests, enterprise security questionnaires).

• Embed security into the pipeline rather than bolting it on at review time.

Leadership

• Set infrastructure and operational standards across the engineering team, and hold the line on them.

• Partner with backend, AI and forward-deployed engineering to make new client deployments faster and lighter each time.

• Hire, mentor and grow the DevOps/platform function as the team scales.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years in DevOps, SRE or platform engineering, with at least 2 years leading or acting as the senior technical owner of infrastructure.

• Deep AWS expertise and production experience running multi-tenant SaaS at scale.

• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code discipline (Terraform or equivalent) - you don't click through consoles.

• Solid CI/CD ownership (GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild or similar) and container orchestration in production.

• Scripting and automation fluency in Python & Bash.

• Real operational maturity: you've been on call for something that mattered, and you've fixed the cause rather than the symptom.

• Working knowledge of security and compliance frameworks relevant to financial services clients.

• Clear, structured written and verbal communication - you can explain a risk to an engineer and to a client's CISO in the same week.

Nice to have

• Experience running AI/LLM workloads in production - inference cost management, vector stores, RAG pipeline infrastructure.

• Experience operating graph databases (Neo4j) or other stateful data infrastructure.

• Exposure to RegTech, fintech, banking or another regulated environment.

• You've already built AI agents or workflows that automate parts of your own work.

Why Newton Russell

• You prefer to be in person. We move faster together, iterate in real time and invest in the Colombo office as the heartbeat of the team.

• You want high ownership and high trust. We back people to ship and learn quickly.

• Real ownership of the platform layer you're co-authoring the architecture, not inheriting someone else's.

• Global ambition, startup pace: built for regulated clients across APAC, Europe and North America from day one.

• Competitive comp in a rapidly growing startup.

Please submit your CV to [email protected] and quote "DevOps Lead" in the subject line.