OpenShift Senior Engineer (Kubernetes/OpenShift)

This is a technical leadership role shaping the future of the OpenShift and Private Cloud platform at Lloyds Banking Group. You'll lead high-impact engineering initiatives across squads and stakeholders, with accountability for outcomes critical to resilience, security, regulatory compliance and customer experience.

You'll set the technical direction and engineering standards for OpenShift at scale, balancing enterprise controls with modern cloud-native practices.

You'll also enable AI, data-intensive, serverless and event-driven workloads safely and consistently, accelerating application teams without compromising control or operability. You'll create impact by:

• Shaping platform strategy and architectural guardrails

• Aligning Engineering, Security, Architecture and Operations

• Leading complex decisions and outcomes across multiple teams

• Raising engineering capability through coaching and influence

You'll focus on platform-wide outcomes, strategic design and enabling delivery through others, while remaining hands-on where it matters. Strategy, architecture and innovation

• Set technical direction and architectural guardrails for OpenShift and supporting hybrid cloud services.

• Lead high-impact design decisions covering resilience, security, scalability, compliance and sustainability.

• Evaluate emerging capabilities, vendor roadmaps and proofs of concept, turning them into practical adoption plans.

Delivery, resilience and security

• Own complex multi-squad initiatives, managing dependencies, operational readiness and safe implementation.

• Balance immediate delivery with platform health, technical debt, reliability and cost efficiency.

• Provide senior technical leadership during major incidents and drive preventative improvements.

• Ensure designs meet the security, audit, availability and recovery requirements of a tier-one financial institution.

Leadership and influence

• Coach senior and lead engineers in system design, decision-making and architectural thinking.

• Represent the platform in governance, design reviews and vendor engagements.

• Build alignment through clear communication and sound technical judgement.

• Extensive experience designing, building and operating OpenShift or Kubernetes platforms at scale in private or hybrid cloud environments.

• Deep knowledge of platform internals, lifecycle management, networking, storage, security controls and integration patterns.

• A proven record of setting architectural direction and engineering standards across multiple teams or platform domains.

• Strong systems thinking and the ability to assess complex distributed platforms and long-term trade-offs.

• Expertise in secure-by-design and resilience engineering within regulated, high-availability environments, including audit, compliance and recovery requirements.

• Experience driving infrastructure automation, standardisation and modernisation through Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD.

• A focus on reliability, reduced operational toil and safe self-service for application teams.

• Experience shaping Agile delivery across squads, using Jira to manage epics, dependencies, progress, risks and constraints.

• The ability to balance strategic change, BAU, risk reduction and innovation across concurrent workstreams.

• Strong leadership through influence and the ability to communicate technical strategy, risk and trade-offs to technical and executive audiences.

• Enabling AI/ML workloads on Kubernetes, including data pipelines, GPU scheduling, model serving and governance.

• Designing Kubernetes-native serverless or event-driven platforms and safe consumption models.

• Applying SRE practices such as error budgets, resilience testing, progressive delivery and platform observability.

• Influencing vendor roadmaps and strategic technical relationships.

• Building engineering communities through mentoring, documentation and technical forums.

• Designing for cost transparency, capacity planning and long-term operational efficiency.

• We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. Whilst this job advert may reference specific years of experience, we recognise that skills are developed in many ways, so if you have relevant, transferable experience, we encourage you to apply.

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual performance-related bonus

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies