Title:  Lead Azure Platform Engineer

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, intermediaries and employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of Great‑West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has been operating in the United Kingdom since 1903. As we continue to modernise our technology estate and strengthen our cloud platforms, we’re investing in experienced engineers who can lead by example and help shape our Azure platform capabilities.

Job Purpose

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 

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that’s regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you’ll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with, income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance.  We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How we work at Canada Life

Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us.  We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures.  Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others.  Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward. 

We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That’s why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion

Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us.  We are proud of the progress we’re making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus. 

“At Canada Life we believe in the power of great people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives coming together to build better futures. Emerging talent is crucial to our growth and creating an environment that continues to inspire us all.”  Nick Harding, Chief People Officer, Canada Life UK

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for you.