DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer in Manchester

Manchester, UK (Hybrid) Full Time Competitive (DOE)

About AR Experts Ltd

AR Experts Ltd is a fast-growing Manchester-based software house building enterprise-grade business management solutions. Our flagship BizAlign suite spans four interconnected products helping organisations run smarter:

• BizAlign HR — Human resources, onboarding, leave & performance management
• BizAlign Workforce — Shift scheduling, attendance tracking & labour compliance
• BizAlign Fleet — Vehicle management, maintenance scheduling & compliance
• BizAlign Telematics — Real-time GPS tracking, driver behaviour & journey analytics

Role Overview

This is a senior hands-on cloud engineering and DevOps role responsible for the complete AWS infrastructure lifecycle across the BizAlign ecosystem. The role covers cloud architecture, EC2 infrastructure, ECS container orchestration, Linux administration, reverse proxies, networking, deployment automation, monitoring, GitHub administration, security hardening, high-availability architecture, performance optimisation, production reliability engineering, and infrastructure scalability. The engineer will take full ownership of designing, securing, automating, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimising enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure environments supporting APIs, telematics platforms, SaaS products, analytics systems, fleet systems, IoT services, and operational business applications.

Core AWS Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture

• Design and maintain production-grade AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Configure and manage EC2 instances, launch templates, AMIs, and auto-scaling groups.
• Architect scalable ECS container orchestration environments.
• Configure VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, internet gateways, peering, and route tables.
• Configure inbound and outbound traffic rules using AWS Security Groups and NACLs.
• Manage Route 53 DNS routing, SSL certificates, domain mappings, and failover routing.
• Configure CloudFront CDN distributions and caching strategies.
• Maintain S3 buckets including lifecycle rules, replication, versioning, storage policies, and permissions.
• Configure and maintain RDS PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora database environments.
• Work with Redis / ElastiCache infrastructure for application caching and session handling.
• Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures.
• Configure disaster recovery, backups, snapshot policies, and failover systems.
• Support multi-environment architecture for development, staging, QA, UAT, and production.
• Configure and manage Linux production servers.
• Install and maintain Apache HTTP Server and NGINX reverse proxy environments.
• Configure HTTPS, SSL/TLS certificates, domain routing, proxy rules, and load balancing.
• Manage PM2 and Forever process managers for Node.js application hosting and monitoring.
• Configure systemd services, startup scripts, cron jobs, and process automation.
• Perform server hardening, package management, patching, upgrades, and operational maintenance.
• Configure swap memory, RAM optimisation, disk management, file system monitoring, and storage expansion.
• Troubleshoot CPU spikes, memory leaks, high I/O usage, process failures, and application crashes.
• Configure firewall rules, SSH security, fail2ban, rate limiting, and access controls.
• Monitor logs, uptime, service health, and infrastructure stability.
• Build and maintain enterprise-grade CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Configure automated deployments for frontend, backend, APIs, containers, and infrastructure.
• Manage GitHub repositories, branch protection rules, deployment environments, secrets, and access permissions.
• Implement automated testing, container image builds, linting, validation, and deployment pipelines.
• Configure blue-green deployments, rolling deployments, and zero-downtime release strategies.
• Integrate GitHub workflows with AWS ECS, EC2, Docker, and deployment services.
• Support Infrastructure-as-Code implementations using Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Automate operational workflows and infrastructure provisioning.

Security, IAM & Networking

• Configure and manage AWS IAM users, groups, roles, permission boundaries, and policies.
• Implement least-privilege access control models.
• Configure inbound and outbound network rules securely across environments.
• Manage security groups, NACLs, WAF protections, VPN connectivity, and secure tunnels.
• Configure secrets management, environment variable protection, and credential rotation.
• Perform vulnerability remediation and operational security hardening.
• Support Cyber Essentials, compliance audits, and operational governance.
• Investigate suspicious activity, unusual traffic patterns, and infrastructure anomalies.

Monitoring, Observability & Reliability Engineering

• Configure CloudWatch dashboards, alarms, log groups, metrics, and monitoring systems.
• Monitor infrastructure uptime, application health, deployment stability, and resource usage.
• Configure alerts for CPU, RAM, swap memory, disk space, API failures, and downtime.
• Implement centralised logging and operational observability practices.
• Investigate outages, deployment failures, infrastructure instability, and production incidents.
• Improve system reliability, resilience, scalability, and operational maturity.

Databases, Redis & Performance Optimisation

• Support PostgreSQL, Aurora, MongoDB, and Redis production environments.
• Optimise database queries, indexing strategies, caching layers, and API responsiveness.
• Configure Redis caching strategies for improved application performance.
• Monitor storage growth, replication health, failover readiness, and backup integrity.
• Work with developers to identify and resolve application bottlenecks and infrastructure limitations.

Preferred Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator.
• AWS Security Specialty.
• Docker Certifications.
• Terraform experience.

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for a senior engineer who brings both technical depth and operational confidence. The ideal candidate:

• Can independently manage and scale cloud infrastructure environments to enterprise-grade standards.
• Maintains high standards around security, automation, operational reliability, and infrastructure quality.
• Can troubleshoot production issues under pressure with a calm, methodical approach.
• Proactively identifies infrastructure weaknesses and drives improvements before they become incidents.
• Collaborates effectively with developers, architects, and operational teams.
• Documents infrastructure clearly and maintains runbooks, diagrams, and deployment records.
• Stays current with AWS service updates, DevOps tooling, and cloud security best practices.

AR Experts Ltd is an equal opportunities employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.