Senior / Lead DevOps Engineer

Job location: Warsaw, hybrid model (onsite 3 days per week) About the role We are partnering with a leading international financial services firm to hire a Senior / Lead DevOps Engineer for its Warsaw-based team. In this role, you will drive CI/CD, release engineering, and artifact management across a fintech environment, supporting engineering teams through automation, modern SDLC practices, and platform standardization. With a predominantly on-premise estate transitioning to GCP and GitLab, you will play a key role in shaping delivery standards, improving software delivery processes, and, at Lead level, providing technical leadership and mentoring across team Key responsibilities: - Design, improve, and maintain CI/CD pipelines, with GitLab as the primary platform and GitHub supported during transition - Build automation, scripts, and internal tools that improve software delivery, testing, deployment, and operational workflows - Support cloud-ready delivery practices, including build environments, artifact promotion, and environment separation - Embed security into pipelines: secrets management, dependency and container scanning, and artifact signing - Partner with development, cloud, and platform teams to understand their use cases, and advise on SDLC, branching strategies, pipeline design, and release practices - Troubleshoot complex issues across the application, pipeline, infrastructure, and cloud layers - Contribute to engineering tooling standards and delivery governance alongside the DevOps Product Manager and Head of DevOps - Apply AI-assisted tooling to accelerate pipeline authoring, troubleshooting, and documentation At Lead level, you will additionally: - Mentor engineers across the central DevOps team and set technical direction for CI/CD and release engineering - Lead cross-team initiatives such as pipeline migrations onto GitLab and adoption of shared CI/CD components - Represent DevOps in design reviews and planning with engineering leads Skills / Experience Required: - Proven experience in DevOps, release engineering, automation, or platform engineering, ideally including pipelines or templates you built that multiple teams now use - Deep hands-on CI/CD expertise — pipeline design, SDLC practices, and modern delivery workflows — on GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub, or comparable platforms - Scripting and automation skills in Bash, Python, or similar languages - Solid Linux knowledge, including command-line tooling, debugging, and system-level troubleshooting - Experience managing package, artifact, or container registries such as Nexus, Artifactory, GitLab Package Registry, or Docker registries - Clear communication skills: able to advise teams, explain technical recommendations, and challenge assumptions constructively - Practical use of AI-assisted tools to improve engineering output, with sound judgement on validating results and protecting confidential information Qualifications: - Senior level: typically 5+ years of relevant experience in DevOps, automation, platform, release, or software engineering - Lead level: typically 8+ years, including experience mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, or driving cross-team initiatives - Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is beneficial; equivalent practical experience is equally valued Desirable Skills: - Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or another regulated environment - Practical cloud and container platform experience: GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, or Terraform - Exposure to software supply chain security practices such as SBOMs, SLSA, or policy-as-code - Development background in strongly typed languages such as Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, or TypeScript - Familiarity with middleware, messaging, or enterprise application architectures - Experience defining reusable pipeline templates, shared CI/CD components, or internal developer tooling Personal attributes: - Hands-on engineer with a service-oriented mindset toward the teams you support - Comfortable in a dynamic environment with different teams, technologies, and delivery models - Solves problems independently and builds consensus rather than imposing solutions - Documents standards and decisions by default - Articulates both written and spoken messages clearly and confidently - Curious about new technologies, with a genuine interest in AI and automation Systems & tools used: - CI/CD and source control: GitLab (primary), Jenkins, GitHub, Git - Package and artifact management: Nexus, Artifactory, GitLab Package Registry, Docker registries - Automation and scripting: Bash, Python, Ansible, Terraform - Platforms: Linux/RHEL, Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, with GCP adoption underway - Delivery and documentation: Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow - AI tools and chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot