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Role 01

DevOps Engineer

The engineer who owns your pipelines, your cloud infrastructure, and the bridge between development and operations. Not a sysadmin. Not a "generalist." Someone who builds and automates at pace.

What separates a genuinely senior DevOps Engineer: they can explain why they made architectural decisions — not just what tools they used. That's what we screen for.

KubernetesTerraformAWS · GCP · AzureGitOpsCI/CDDockerHelm

What we look for in a senior DevOps Engineer

  • Can design CI/CD from scratch and explain trade-off decisions
  • Has owned cloud cost optimisation (not just resource tagging)
  • Can articulate when Kubernetes is the wrong choice
  • Has pushed back on developer decisions for reliability reasons
  • Understands security posture — not just pipeline mechanics
  • Can onboard a team to IaC — not just write Terraform themselves

What we look for in a senior SRE

  • Has defined SLOs — not just monitored against existing ones
  • Can explain what an error budget is and how they've used it
  • Has run a blameless post-mortem and driven action items through
  • Has reduced toil with a specific, measurable outcome
  • Has pushed back on a feature release for reliability reasons
  • Understands the difference between monitoring and observability
Role 02

Site Reliability Engineer

Not a DevOps engineer with a fancy title. A genuine SRE owns error budgets, defines SLOs, runs post-mortems with rigour, and pushes back on dev teams when reliability is being compromised. That's a fundamentally different role.

Most agencies can't tell the difference. We can. And we screen for it specifically.

SLO/SLAError BudgetsObservabilityIncident ResponseChaos Engineering
Role 03

Platform Engineer

The role that serious engineering organisations hire when they're ready to invest in developer velocity. Platform Engineers build internal developer platforms — golden paths, self-service infrastructure, and abstractions that make every other engineer faster.

This is the fastest-growing role in UK Series A/B tech right now. Most agencies don't know what it means. We've been tracking it since it emerged.

IDPBackstageService MeshPlatform APIsDeveloper Experience

What we look for in a senior Platform Engineer

  • Has built or contributed to an internal developer platform
  • Thinks in terms of developer experience — not just infrastructure
  • Can design self-service tooling with guardrails
  • Has stakeholder management experience with dev teams
  • Understands the golden path philosophy and when to deviate
  • Can articulate what "good" looks like for platform eng at your stage
The Difference

What John Talent does differently.

The gap between what most agencies do and what we do is not small.

Every other agency

  • 10–15 CVs in week one — screening outsourced to you
  • Keyword matching — no architectural depth
  • Junior account manager runs the search after first call
  • 4-week rebate — engineer leaves at week 5, you absorb the loss
  • Same candidates sent to 6 other companies simultaneously
  • SRE and DevOps treated as the same role

John Talent

  • Maximum 3 CVs — every one personally screened
  • Architectural screening — reasoning, not keyword matching
  • Founder runs every search, start to finish
  • 12-week sliding scale rebate — confident in who we place
  • Exclusive search available — your hire isn't being shopped around
  • SRE and DevOps understood as distinct disciplines
Fees

Simple. Transparent. No surprises.

Two engagement models. Both include a 12-week sliding scale rebate.

Contingency

20% of first year salary

Pay on successful placement only. Ideal for companies who want to test the relationship first.

  • No upfront cost
  • Max 3 CVs per role
  • 12-week sliding scale rebate
  • Direct founder access throughout

Retained Search

25–30% split across 3 stages

Full exclusive search. We go deep, move fast, and treat your hire as the only search on our desk.

  • Exclusive search — not sent elsewhere
  • Priority access to passive candidates
  • Deeper market mapping
  • 12-week sliding scale rebate
  • Founder involvement at every stage

Have a role in mind?

Let's talk about whether we're the right fit. No obligation, no pitch.

Start a Search →