DevOps Engineer - AWS / Azure in England

Location: Remote, UK

Salary: Circa £47,000 per annum, depending on skills and experience

Job Type: Full Time, Permanent

Working Hours: 37.5 hours per week to cover core business hours (9-5, Mon-Fri)

Working for Affinity

We understand the importance of flexibility, wellness, performance and satisfaction - indeed it is part of our culture. We offer opportunities to take unpaid leave and will give you one extra day's holiday for every year you've worked with us, for up to 8 years. We know working from home introduces opportunities for you to do more domestic chores during the day, e.g. picking up the children from school, taking pets to the vet, etc. We don’t mind this at all, as long as we are aware of what you are doing and the work gets done!

About the Role

We are looking for someone who is passionate about technology and who is always looking for opportunities to improve the services we provide for clients, in areas such as efficiency, cost effectiveness, security and reliability. You’ll be pivotal in knowledge sharing internally within the business, assisting others in their assigned projects and, where necessary, supporting more junior members of Affinity to help them learn and improve. The right DevOps engineer will have the opportunity to help grow and shape this emerging function within the team, creating a long-term career path for themselves within Affinity, with an opportunity to progress upwards.

What will your typical day look like?

• You will be working on projects, such as the Cabinet Office WordPress support contract, to keep our clients’ systems up-to-date, available, resilient, secure, performing well and cost effective.
• Working to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure related processes.
• At times you’ll need to work together with clients’ own internal teams and with any external infrastructure teams that Affinity may partner with.
• Putting together infrastructure design documents at the start of projects, with a view to getting these signed off by the client and then acting as the basis for infrastructure build.
• Building infrastructure on new projects through the use of Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, etc. This will also include continuous integration processes, server provisioning, etc.
• Imparting knowledge and experience to other Affinity team members, both verbally and also captured in tools such as Jira Confluence, where we would like to build up a repository of DevOps how-tos, best practices, etc.
• Opportunity to work as a team lead where other Affinity team members are involved in DevOps.
• Providing AWS and Azure thought leadership and mentoring in both advisory and delivery contexts.
• Supporting out-of-hours rotas to provide support coverage for contracts in place with Affinity.

About you

General requirements:

• Willingness to provide on-call rota coverage of emergency support (24/7/365).
• Ability to work flexible hours from time to time, for specific projects or tasks.
• UK based and resident in UK for last 3 years (given some client-driven security clearance requirements).
• The role is fully remote, though visits to clients and to our office in Cornwall will occasionally be required.

Technical must-haves:

• Commercial experience of AWS, including services such as Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS/EKS, Amazon EFS, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS Cost Explorer, etc.
• Commercial experience of Azure, including services such as Azure Networking, Azure Cache (Redis and Memcached), App Services (running WordPress and .NET applications), Front Doors (CDN), API Services, storage services (blob storage, file storage, etc.), Azure Database services, Azure Cost Management, etc.
• Terraform and/or CloudFormation scripting.
• Linux, Apache/Nginx.
• Continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) experience including GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with the AWS/Azure Well-Architected Framework and NCSC Cloud Security Principles.
• Security experience, including the resolution of issues found during penetration testing.
• Docker experience.

Technical nice-to-haves:

• System/server admin experience.
• Drupal, WordPress or Magento experience.
• PHP and Composer.
• Microsoft technologies, including .NET, Windows Server, IIS, Active Directory, MSSQL, etc.
• AWS certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, DevOps Engineer - Professional, speciality certifications, e.g., Database, Security, etc.).
• Microsoft certifications, including Azure Fundamentals, Azure Administrator Associate, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Azure Security Engineer Associate, etc.
• Load testing experience, including jMeter, Gatling, K6, etc.
• Other HashiCorp tools, e.g., Packer, Vault, Vagrant, Consul, etc.
• Provisioning tools, e.g., Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.
• AWS Control Tower and/or Landing Zone.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates.

Please click the APPLY button to submit your CV for this role.

Candidates with the experience or relevant job titles of: Software Developer, Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, AWS, Infrastructure Engineer, AWS Systems Developer, Azure Software Development may also be considered for this role.