www.clearygottlieb.com

Senior DevOps Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer who brings a platform-reliability and automation mindset to how we build and deploy software.

You’ll work across the full software development lifecycle (building, testing, deploying and instrumenting secure applications) and partner with the development team to identify and provision the infrastructure they need.

You’ll work closely with Infosec and IT, balancing the team’s operational needs with security and compliance requirements. You’ll negotiate and advocate for process improvements that benefit the development team, and be the primary point of contact for software operations and security.
You’ll also work closely with developers to spot deployment risks and inefficiencies and find creative ways to address them through automation and development experience improvements. You’ll use your judgement and knowledge of Firm priorities to decide which automation projects to take on and how to structure systems around new work.

About the team:

We’re an internal team at Cleary Gottlieb building bespoke AI solutions, drawing on software engineering and data science. We work at the boundary of enterprise-grade software, and we are regularly building services and applications nobody here has built before. That makes for a dynamic environment with real opportunity to learn, and requires good judgement and critical thinking.

We are a tight-knit, remote-first team that values ownership, honesty, and curiosity. We work collaboratively across multiple disciplines (engineering, data science, legal domain experts, and product) to deliver meaningful impact.
The team has strong foundations in place and is looking for someone to help us continue to evolve and improve our practices.

You’ll join a Junior DevOps Engineer as the second member of the DevOps team, reporting to the Senior Manager (ex-CTO at Springbok). This function is critical to the team and likely to grow. As a dedicated senior hire, you’ll have real scope to shape the role, including directly influencing how we manage work (Kanban boards, sprint cadence, delivery process). 

Main Responsibilities:

  • Design, implement and maintain secure-by-default cloud and application infrastructure handling client confidential datasets
  • Define, implement and improve CI/CD pipelines that support rapid and safe deployment of AI applications and services
  • Maintain a hardened container-based sandbox for our Data Science team
  • Implement security automation for testing, scanning, vulnerability management, and remediation
  • Manage and be accountable for secrets, identity, and access management patterns, ensuring strong least-privilege principles and key rotation
  • Define and continuously improve monitoring, observability, and reliability standards across the platform
  • Design resilience and disaster recovery strategies, including backup validation and restoration testing
  • Ensure adherence to compliance standards (ISO, SOC 2) and regulations, contributing to auditability and compliance-by-design for a legal domain environment
  • Participate in incident analysis and remediation planning
  • Understand how to apply established controls to new systems. E.g. how to firewall an agentic system deployed to the cloud

Skills and Experience:

  • Minimum of 5 years’ experience in a developer or developer adjacent role
  • Minimum of 3 years’ experience in DevOps
  • Ability to interact effectively and build successful relationships with internal teams and stakeholders
  • Comfortable taking initiative and adapting quickly to deliver results
  • Good judgment around scope, prioritisation, and delivery
  • Strong AWS experience
  • Infrastructure as Code in Terraform
  • Strong familiarity with Docker.
  • Familiarity with at least one container orchestration tool (we use ECS, we will consider experience with K8s or similar)
  • Familiarity with software development, including design patterns, languages and frameworks (Python and React/TypeScript preferred)
  • Familiarity with databases (primarily PostgreSQL)
  • GitHub, with focus on CI/CD and security configuration (we will consider experience with GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins or similar)
  • CI/CD automation and pipeline patterns for multi-environment software deployment

Desirable Experience:

  • Cloud platforms (Azure)
  • Identity, role-based access, and secrets lifecycle management
  • Observability: monitoring, logging, alerting, SLOs, dashboards
  • Security governance in regulated / compliance-sensitive environments
  • Modern threat landscape for software development teams: dependency chain vulnerabilities, development machine security, agentic systems exploit

If you meet some — not all — of the above criteria, we still encourage you to apply. We value learning ability, adaptability, and thoughtful engineering judgment above box-ticking.

If you are interested in applying, please submit a CV and short cover letter to the London Human Resources Team, LON-HR@cgsh.com.