Role Purpose:
Lead Level 3 support for critical digital services, ensuring high availability, fast incident recovery, and long-term resilience. Drive root cause elimination, design supportable architectures, oversee major changes, and mentor support teams. Ensure alignment with DDaT, DevOps, and Home Office service expectations.
Key Outcomes & Responsibilities
• Major Incident Leadership: Act as technical lead for P1/P2 incidents, coordinating recovery and communication.
• Root Cause Ownership: Lead formal RCAs, define corrective actions, and ensure follow-through via sprints/releases.
• Change & Release Governance: Review technical change plans, lead high-risk deployments, and support hotfix releases.
• Availability & Performance: Improve reliability through proactive monitoring, self-healing automation, and architectural enhancements.
• Environment Strategy: Maintain stable non-production environments and collaborate with environment management teams.
• Service Performance: Drive SLA achievement, service reviews, metrics analysis, and proactive improvements.
• Shift Left & Knowledge Management: Develop high-quality runbooks, automate manual tasks, and train L1/L2 teams.
• Transition Support: Provide documentation, KT, and pairing during onboarding/offboarding of support teams.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers and collaborate with product, DevOps, and development teams.
Essential Skills (Must Have)
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, Java, Javascript, microservices, APIs, and cloud platforms.
• Strong debugging skills using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and release management.
• Strong scripting and automation capabilities.
• Ability to lead technical bridges under pressure
Desirable Skills (Nice to Have)
• Advanced cloud knowledge (AWS professional level).
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS).
• Knowledge of reliability engineering practices (SRE).
• Experience improving infrastructure via IaC.
• Ability to contribute to architecture decisions.
Experience Profile
• 5–10+ years in Level 3 support, DevOps engineering, or SRE roles.
• Significant experience managing critical systems with high availability requirements.
• Proven leadership in major incidents and change governance.
Ways of Working
• Operates within Agile product teams with DevOps principles.
• Leads service reviews, problem boards, and continual improvement cycles.
• Coaches and mentors engineering teams.
Location & Security
UK-based, hybrid working as agreed with Client; SC eligibility is required
Certification (Preferred)
• AWS/Azure Professional
• SRE or DevOps Practitioner Certifications
What we offer
- The chance to work with impact. Here, you’re empowered to bring your biggest thinking to help our company and clients improve everyday life.
- Ownership over your career. Stay at the top of your game through our award-winning learning and development ecosystem. And when your ambitions change or we offer new opportunities, we help you pivot by providing reskilling, on-the-job learning and guidance to find new roles that might be a better fit.
- The opportunity to thrive on a high caliber team with heart. We celebrate each other’s experiences and perspectives and promote a sense of belonging through our affinity groups and diversity and inclusion initiatives.
- A comprehensive total rewards package, including a competitive salary and a pension plan with matching contributions.
- Flexible health and financial benefits to support you and your eligible dependents—from day one.
- True work-life balance. Be at your best through paid time off, flexible work arrangements, volunteering opportunities, social events, and so much more.
About us
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) is an AI Builder and technology services provider, building the bridge between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization’s unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, realize tangible returns and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.
Other employment-related information
Cognizant is an equal opportunity employer. Your application and candidacy will not be considered based on race, color, sex, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, provincial or local laws.
If you have a disability that requires reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening or submit an application, please email [email protected] with your request and contact information.
Language requirements vary depending on roles, but we ask that all candidates have basic English proficiency for company-wide communications purposes. For roles based in Quebec, professional English proficiency is required, as you’ll deliver services to and collaborate with stakeholders outside the province who may not speak French.