Engineering Manager - DevOps & AI Platform

Do you want to lead the engineering functions that decide how a platform screening over a billion dollars of crypto transactions every week is built and run? Are you a DevOps leader fascinated by the possibilities of both agentic software solutions and the usage of agents in the software delivery lifecycle? Are you looking for a values-led company that cares about the growth of its people as much as the strength of its platform?

Elliptic is where ambitious people do the most important work of their careers. We are making crypto safe, secure and scalable, preventing global financial crime, exposing bad actors and protecting the world's financial system as it is being revolutionized. This is work your friends will actually want to hear about. You can expect to work in highly empowered teams, with remarkable breadth and the freedom to turn bold ideas into real impact, supported every step of the way by some of the most brilliant people you have ever called colleagues.

The impact you will have:

This role provides the people leadership for two connected functions at the heart of how Elliptic engineers. On the DevOps side, you keep a latency-sensitive screening platform dependable, cost-effective and scalable as transaction volume and customer expectations grow. On the AI Platform side, you lead the team that acts as Elliptic's centre of excellence for building AI agents, owning the shared frameworks, patterns, MCP management and evaluation capability that every product team draws on. You are a two-way conduit for that centre of excellence: carrying its best practice out to teams, and helping define what those best approaches should be. Reliability remains foundational to everything Elliptic does, and you will champion strong SRE practices across the business, though the SRE function itself sits outside your direct people-management scope. This is a hands-off, strategy and people-leadership role: you lead and grow the people, set the operating model, and make the calls that shape DevOps and AI Platform at Elliptic.

What you will do:

• Lead, grow and develop the people across two functions, DevOps and AI Platform, owning hiring, levelling, coaching and career development for a combined team of roughly twelve engineers.

• Set the strategy and operating model for DevOps: release safety, developer experience, observability, cost and the scalability of a latency-sensitive screening platform.

• Lead the AI Platform function as a centre of excellence, owning the people and operating model behind Elliptic's shared agent-building frameworks and patterns, MCP management, evaluation framework and shared AI infrastructure.

• Act as a two-way conduit for the centre of excellence: disseminate best practice and reusable approaches out to product teams building their own agents, and channel their feedback back to define and improve those approaches.

• Partner with the AI Platform technical lead and senior engineers to shape technical direction, bringing people leadership and delivery rather than owning the technical vision single-handedly.

• Own the cost, scalability and efficiency of the infrastructure as volume grows, bringing a FinOps mindset to infrastructure spend.

• Champion SRE and reliability practices across the business, partnering closely with the SRE function.

• Support the infrastructure and process maturity needed for certifications such as ISO 27001 and SOC2, working with InfoSec.

What you will achieve in the first 6 months:

• Built trust across both functions and their counterparts, and developed a clear, evidence-based picture of the platform's reliability and cost posture and of how the AI Platform centre of excellence currently works and shares knowledge.

• Shaped and begun executing a people and hiring strategy across both functions, growing DevOps toward its target and building out the AI Platform and AI infrastructure team.

• Begun operating as an effective conduit for the centre of excellence, strengthening how agent-building best practice, MCP and evaluation approaches are defined centrally and adopted by product teams.

• Established a clear point of view on AI SDLC and how the platform enables it, and championed SRE practices across the business.

You will be a great fit here if you:

• Lead through people: you measure your success by the growth and impact of your team, not your own output.

• Are credible with senior engineers without needing to be the hands-on expert: you ask the sharp question and facilitate the right decision.

• Are genuinely curious about AI, agents and evaluations, and energised by helping an organisation learn to build with them well.

• Are honest and pragmatic about timelines and trade-offs, and comfortable owning a long-term build-out across two functions.

• Care about the mission: providing the infrastructure and intelligence that keep financial institutions safe from crypto crime and sanctions evasion.

Our ideal candidate has:

• A track record of managing DevOps, platform or infrastructure engineers, including hiring and building a growing team.

• An infrastructure background (cloud, IaC, CI/CD, observability) deep enough to make sound strategic calls and guide senior engineers toward the right ones.

• Extreme curiosity about AI and budding hands-on experience with AI, agents and evaluations: not necessarily deep expertise, but a real, demonstrated pull toward the space and the judgement to grow into leading it.

• A strong interest in the nuances of the AI-assisted SDLC, and the conviction that tooling alone does not make engineers more potent. Adoption, practice and guardrails are what turn AI access into real leverage.

• Kubernetes literacy, grounded in hands-on experience as an engineer, sufficient to reason about the estate and challenge the team's decisions.

• AI fluency: candidates must be able to demonstrate practical, responsible use of AI in an engineering context and the ability to set team norms for it. We are looking for an active AI promoter who can reason about where AI adds leverage and where it is a liability in a compliance setting.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience leading or building an internal platform, ML platform, developer-experience or enablement function.

• Hands-on exposure to agent frameworks, MCP, or building and running evaluation frameworks.

• Experience of a company scaling phase.

• Exposure to ISO 27001 / SOC2 and what they demand of infrastructure and process.

• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems in a regulated or financial context.

• HODLs Crypto.

Job Benefits

> How we work:

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year

• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space

> Learning & Development:

• $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development

> Vacation/ Leave:

• Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays

• An extra day for your birthday

• Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave and leave.

> Benefits:

• Private Health Insurance - we use Bupa!

• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support

• Life Assurance: we hope you will never need this - but our cover is for 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries

• Cycle to Work Scheme