Senior SRE & Automation Lead

Professional Services was formed as a progressive development towards the convergence of multiple domains across BT. We pride ourselves on providing expert third line support to an extensive range of services; ensuring the required levels of availability are maintained. The team is widely recognised for getting things done, while making transformational improvements along the way. We do this by ensuring we have the right people to achieve our high ambitions. This role is pivotal in driving automation and operational excellence within Professional Services. You’ll lead the automation strategy, evolve development practices and champion an SRE mindset to improve reliability, scalability and performance across our platforms, inclusive of our hosting infrastructure. By leveraging deep technical expertise and end-to-end ownership, you’ll deliver flawless change, enhance service availability, and unlock time for the team to focus on solving business problems. Your work will enable smarter processes, stronger collaboration, and a “brilliant” customer experience, making automation and resilience the foundation of everything we do.

What you’ll be doing – your accountabilities

• Actively contributing and drives the Professional Services automation strategy.
• Owns and contributes to the roadmap for the APPID’s we manage, including EoSL planning, application lifecycle, compute requirements & BCM planning.
• Manages compute infrastructure hosts including patching and security vulnerability management.
• Builds network automation frameworks that allow for efficient test, build & deployment of new automated processes, inclusive of CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensuring we deliver robust code in an efficient manor.
• Enact the Professional Services driverless change ambition, actively looking for potential use cases, starting the conversation and driving for success.
• Contributes to the development of the Professional Services team in the adoption of an SRE approach.
• Participate and be the technical lead on incidents within immediate domain and be part of PIR write up and solution.
• Acts as a subject matter expert for the TSA guidelines, influencing working practices to ensure we remain compliant with industry standards.
• Will champion and build effective working relationships, both internally and externally to deliver business outcomes.
• Responsible for delivering complex network change and providing assurance of Fixed network platforms managed by Professional Services.

The skills you’ll need to succeed

You must have:

• A strong level of proficiency in at least one programming language preferably Python.
• An understanding of the fundamentals of Ansible and how to apply it.
• A strong understanding of containerisation using docker, podman or a similar container engine.
• A good knowledge of coding best practices including code structure, peer review & testing.
• A good knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and familiarity with either Gitlab CI/CD or Jenkins.
• You will be confident and professional in communicating with all stakeholders, both locally and with members of the Senior Management Team.
• You will have the ability to work in a high-pressure environment.
• A good grasp of network engineering fundamentals.
• A good understanding of HTTP/ web API’s.

Desired:

• Strong understanding of IP/MPLS networks.
• Strong proficiency in building CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of Ansible, you will have built an Ansible repo from the ground up to perform heavy lift deployment.
• Strong understanding of container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes).
• OS Administration: Strong system administration skills, across an array of operating systems such as Linux, Windows etc. with a focus on performance optimisation, security, and automation.
• Cloud Computing: Strong understanding cloud computing and best practices.