Lead DevOps Engineer (Contract, Outside IR35)

Contract: Outside IR35
Start date: December 2026
Length: Three months initially with a chance to extend
Location: Remote first based within 50 miles of Edinburgh Newcastle Leeds Manchester or London

A lot of DevOps contracts drop you into someone elses setup and ask you to keep it running. On this one youll decide how its built.

Youll lead the DevOps work from day one with the authority to make decisions and see them through.

Youll join a team that already knows what good looks like so you wont spend your first month untangling things.

Youll be working for hedgehog lab a digital product consultancy with 20 years of experience. Were around 100 people B Corp and Great Place to Work certified and backed by a growth capital investor.

Your clients will be public and private sector organisations going through digital transformation from moving to a new tech stack to building an AI platform from scratch. They include retail health tech and financial services businesses.

Youll sit in a project team of 5 to 15 people alongside agentic engineers software engineers QA and designers.

Youll design and run AWS infrastructure for products built in TypeScript Node and Python.

Youll build and improve the CI/CD pipelines that let teams release often and safely and manage it all as code so environments stay secure monitored and cost effective.

Youll talk client stakeholders through technical decisions and guide other engineers on DevOps practice.

Youll come into an office or client site for important meetings workshops and key moments.

Youll have hands-on AWS experience in production and be comfortable with infrastructure as code ideally Terraform.

Youll know CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI plus containers and orchestration such as Docker ECS or Kubernetes.

Youll have led DevOps work or guided other engineers and youll be confident talking to clients and non-technical stakeholders.

If youre free from December and want to own the platform apply below and well be in touch.