Canada Life

Location: London, Watford or Bristol (Hybrid working options available) We're seeking a Lead Azure Platform Engineer to play a key role in designing, building and running our Azure platform services. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, combining deep engineering expertise with mentoring, standards-setting and influence across teams. You'll work as part of our Platform Engineering capability, enabling delivery teams through secure, scalable and well-architected Azure platforms, while helping drive modern DevOps, automation and reliability practices. What You'll Do Design, build and evolve Azure platform services used across delivery teams. Lead the implementation of secure, scalable and resilient Azure environments. Be hands-on with development work: writing code, reviewing pull requests and deploying to production. Act as a technical authority within the platform and delivery ecosystem. Own and evolve Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and/or Bicep. Drive automation that removes toil, improves reliability and accelerates delivery. Leverage GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted tooling to increase productivity and quality. Champion consistent patterns for networking, identity, security and landing zones. Lead the development of CI/CD pipelines and automated infrastructure delivery. Promote strong observability, monitoring and alerting practices. Take part in incident response, root cause analysis and platform stability improvements. Balance build-and-run responsibilities with a focus on long-term platform health. Set and maintain engineering standards, guardrails and best practices. Mentor engineers through pairing, code reviews and knowledge-sharing sessions. Proactively identify technical debt and lead initiatives to address it. Influence tooling, ways of working and adoption of new technologies across teams. Who You Are Essential Experience & Skills Strong experience as a cloud, platform or DevOps engineer. Deep knowledge of Microsoft Azure and core platform services. Proven experience delivering Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform and/or Bicep). Strong scripting skills (PowerShell, Bash and/or Python). Experience building or operating CI/CD pipelines. Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset. An AI first mindset focused on skills development for SRE Desirable Experience Azure networking and security architecture experience. Container platforms (Docker, AKS). Cloud governance, cost management (FinOps) or security practices. Azure DevOps and/or GitHub enterprise environments. Cross-plane experience