Technical Application Specialist - Kubernetes / Digital Certificates

JOB TITLE: Technical Application Specialist 

SALARY: £39,825 – £48,675 

LOCATION(S): Leeds 

HOURS: Full-time - 35 hours per week 

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites. 

About this opportunity 

As Technical Application Service Specialist, you’ll be working to deliver robust certificate management solutions to the organisation including complex projects and implementations, with particular focus on containerised workloads. You'll be involved with the design, deployment, management and optimisation of the digital certificate and PKI infrastructure. The role will have the opportunity to take on exciting topics such as crypto agility, shorter lived certs and quantum readiness as well as finding opportunities to optimise and maximise our certificate estate. 

Working as part of our Platform team, you’ll be part of technical initiatives to build and scale certificate automation patterns for containerised services running in Kubernetes environments. Your work will enable secure, scalable, and developer-friendly solutions that can be adopted across the bank. 

Day to day, you'll: 

• Kubernetes Operations & Certificate Automation 
  Lead the operation of containerised services in Kubernetes, ensuring seamless certificate automation across workloads, ingress controllers, and service mesh components. Design and maintain secure, scalable automation patterns that are easy for internal teams to adopt. 

• Lifecycle & Platform Management 
  Oversee the full lifecycle of certificate authorities, including automated renewal, secure distribution, and succession planning. Drive platform improvements through cloud-native tooling, GitOps workflows, and Kubernetes-native integrations. 

• Technical Troubleshooting & Standards 
  Conduct deep root cause analysis of certificate-related issues using scripting and observability tools. Define product specifications and testing standards to ensure certificate tooling aligns with Kubernetes-native workflows and evolving platform needs. 

• Consultation & Mentorship 
  Provide expert guidance to internal teams on secure certificate implementation, covering mutual TLS, service mesh integration, and secret management. Mentor junior engineers and contribute to platform engineering best practices. 

• Security Policy & Governance 
  Support IT Security policy development and implementation across containerised environments, ensuring procedures are aligned with secure certificate practices and monitored effectively. 

What you’ll need 

• Cloud Technology – You’ll be highly proficient with cloud technologies, in particular; Kubernetes 

• Technology Expertise - Provide deep technical insights and lead the resolution of complex service-related issues within our source business systems and our web technologies. Demonstrated ability to implement system changes and ensure operational stability across multiple platforms and business units. 

• Operational - Take full ownership of system availability, performance, and currency, accepting 24/7 accountability. Proven experience improving Run operations for high-availability systems, including automation, monitoring, and observability. Demonstrable experience of incident resolution, war room support and root cause identification. Troubleshoot, debug, and resolve technical issues and challenges. Explains and prioritises problems and their possible solutions with colleagues and other partners. 

• Leadership - Setting engineering standards and ensuring solutions align with business goals and architecture. Define, communicate, and implement the engineering service strategy and standards across the platform by focusing on methods and collaborating to embed them throughout end-to-end engineering activities. Ability to support diverse engineering change in an agile environment, with strong collaboration and communication skills. Responsible for line management, coaching, mentoring, and promoting best practices across Product & Engineering. 

• Governance - Manage third party relationships and support regular Governance meetings, with a focus on service performance, security and risks. 

About working for us 

Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you will too 

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. 

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know 

What you'll get in return:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15% 

• An annual performance-related bonus 

• Share schemes including free shares 

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 26 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies 

This is a once in a career opportunity to help shape your future as well as ours. Join us and grow with purpose.