Lead the evolution of tails.com’s AWS platform - design scalable, secure, resilient systems & turn complexity into clear, modern patterns.
We’re Tails.com, a dog food subscription company with a big difference. We create truly tailored food for each and every dog we serve. We start by asking people a few simple questions about their dog. Then we use that information to create their dog’s unique Tails.com recipe – so their dog gets exactly the nutrition they need, in the taste they love, delivered to their door every month. It’s clever stuff.
We’ve got bold plans. Having created an entirely new category in pet food, we’re now scaling fast – backed by Purina, one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards the same goals – and a bunch of smart-ish dogs, all working on their own thing.
Together, we’ll change the world of pet food for good.
Build our brand
We’re building an international brand, fast. We set ambitious goals. We challenge and support each other in equal measure. At the pace we’re moving, we prefer to test ideas and learn quickly rather than spend months building a business case. That means we celebrate when things go right, and we learn when things go wrong.
Sound like a team you want to join? Here’s how you’ll make a difference:
We want to reshape our cloud platform so it is intentionally designed for where the business is heading - scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective by design rather than by accumulation. This is where you come in.
As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will help lead that evolution from within the platform. You will take a critical, system-level view of our AWS environment, its architecture, deployment model, resilience patterns, observability, security guardrails, and cost structure, and help define what good looks like for the next phase of tails.com.
This is not about incremental patching or maintaining the status quo. It is about applying sound engineering judgement to decide what should be retained, what should be simplified, and what should be redesigned. You will help turn accumulated complexity into clear, repeatable platform patterns that enable engineering teams to move quickly and safely.
You will work closely with our engineering teams to ensure services are designed for operability and scale from the outset, and with the tails.com security function to embed secure-by-default principles and strengthen resilience and detection capabilities across the platform.
This role is suited to a senior engineer who enjoys reducing systemic complexity, shaping architecture through influence rather than authority, and remaining hands-on while improving the foundations beneath a growing product organisation.
Key Responsibilities:
Cloud & Platform Engineering
Own and evolve the AWS platform architecture for scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
Lead architectural redesign where systems show strain or fragility.
Establish reusable infrastructure patterns that reduce drift and technical debt.
Improve operational maturity through strong observability and reliability practices.
DevOps & Automation
Design release strategies that keep production changes safe and predictable.
Eliminate manual processes through automation across the platform.
Turn incidents into architectural improvements through effective remediation.
Improve developer experience by making the right way the easy way.
Security, Guardrails & Resilience
Embed secure-by-default principles into platform architecture and delivery pipelines.
Strengthen cloud identity boundaries, isolation, and defence-in-depth.
Partner with the tails.com security team to evolve resilience, monitoring, and threat detection capabilities.
Ensure backup, recovery, and failure-domain strategies are deliberate, tested, and robust.
Collaboration & Technical Influence
Engage early in service design to ensure reliability, scalability, and security are built in.
Challenge designs that introduce risk or unnecessary complexity.
Contribute to platform standards and reference architectures.
Raise engineering standards through example, peer review, and pragmatic mentorship.
Skills & Qualifications
Significant experience building and evolving AWS cloud platforms in production.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resilience, and operational risk.
Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation.
Experience designing safe, reliable deployment and release strategies.
Strong grasp of cloud security fundamentals and secure-by-default architecture.
Experience working with security teams to strengthen resilience and detection capabilities.
Solid scripting and automation capability.
Clear communicator, able to translate technical risk into pragmatic improvements.
Key Attributes
Platform-minded and systems-oriented.
Reliability-focused and comfortable designing for failure.
Security-aware and pragmatic.
Influential through technical credibility rather than authority.
Calm under pressure and outcome-driven.
What's in it for you?
Competitive salary, reviewed annually
Annual bonus, based on company performance
Flexible core hours, giving you true work life balance
Hybrid role to ensure this role works for you - We expect employees to have a conducive remote working environment (including an appropriate desk and adjustable chair) available for their start date.
25 days of holiday (excluding bank holidays) which increases over time to a max of 27 days
9/10 day working week to enhance your wellbeing without a reduction in pay and leave allowance
Optional 5 days unpaid leave and 1 paid volunteer day each year
When you need a change of scenery, you can work from abroad 2 weeks every 6 months
Health insurance for you, paid by Tails.com
Extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay. 6 months at 70% pay
Flexible paid care leave to support immediate dependants, people close to you and pets
In house L&D team, with access to year round courses to help drive your development
50% discount on all Tails.com
Discounted gym membership
What’s next?
If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an under-represented demographic.
Here’s a taster of how our recruitment process works:
Once you have applied your CV will be reviewed by the Talent Acquisition Team.
If selected, you will then have a call with the TA Team who will tell you more about us and the role, as well as learning more about your skills and experience.
Should you be successful, the next stage will be a video call with the hiring manager.
If successful, you will be invited to present a task back to a panel of interviewers.
The final stage is a video call with our wider squad (30 mins).
We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com.
During your interview process you’ll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.
