Junior DevOps Engineer in Hook

Location: Hybrid Role, working from home & travel to BCA Hook, Hampshire

Working hours: 40 hours per week Monday – Friday

Job Status: Permanent

We are recruiting four vacancies across IT, for recent graduates! Two in our Enterprise Applications team and a further two in Technology Operations!

Constellation Automotive Group (CAG) Technology Operations are looking for a recent technology graduate to join as a Junior with a long‐term learning journey to eventually grow into a DevOps Engineer with AutosOnShow, a subsidiary of CAG.

You will work with an experienced Manager who will develop and improve your skill set through hands‐on project experience, and structured training. Longer term you will help you develop your skills to enable you to transition from manual tasks to technical supportive ownership of a commercial cloud environment.

The Role

The Technology: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. You will be able to support an end‐to‐end lifecycle of cloud infrastructure, from the initial mapping of architecture on computerised whiteboards to the automated deployment of non‐production resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Your manager will tailor a learning journey that will include hands‐on project experience, working with different technologies. You will build your skills through serving as a "Responder" for system alerts, maintaining the health of CI/CD pipelines, and from writing Python or Bash scripts to automate repetitive tasks in a "Security‐First" approach.

Learning Journey:

• Month 1: IAM (users/roles), VPC basics, and CloudWatch.
• Month 2: AWS CLI, S3, and EC2/Lambda fundamentals.
• Month 3: Introduction to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) – Reading and "Plan‐ing" code.
• Month 4‐6: CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or AWS CodePipeline) and Linux.
• Month 7‐12: Ownership of small features and incident response. Focusing on ECS/EKS, Serverless and Security.

In time you will learn to be responsible for end‐to‐end projects.

• Mapping of architecture on a computerised whiteboard based on findings.
• Automate a simple repetitive task (e.g., a script to list unused EBS volumes or older S3 snapshots).
• Deploy a single, non‐production resource (like an S3 bucket or an SQS queue) using your team's IaC standards.
• Create a new CI/CD "branch" for a dummy application that includes a mega linten or security scanning step.
• Lead a "Small Feature" project, such as migrating a manual cron job to an AWS EventBridge + Lambda setup.
• Perform a "Manual Triage" day identifying why a pipeline didn’t trigger or ways to optimise (e.g., was it a connection break or a failed buildspec?).

90% of your learning will be achieved through hands‐on project experience, including:

• CI/CD Pipeline Maintenance & Support
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Development
• Observability & System Health
• Security & Compliance (DevSecOps)
• Automation

You will also have the support of a wider Constellation Automotive Group Graduate community, skilled mentors and Learning Development experts. It will be your learning journey, developed with your Manager, but owned by you.

What skills are we looking for?

The Junior role doesn’t need to know all 200+ AWS services, but they must master these "Core Five":

• IAM (Identity & Access Management): Understanding Roles vs. Users and how to write least‐privilege JSON policies.
• VPC (Networking): Understanding Public vs. Private subnets, Security Groups, and NACLs.
• Compute: Basic management of EC2 (Virtual Machines) and Lambda (Serverless).
• Storage: S3 bucket policies, lifecycle rules, and versioning.
• Monitoring: Navigating CloudWatch logs and setting up basic Metric Filters.

Git Proficiency: Beyond git commit. They need to understand branching strategies (GitFlow), resolving merge conflicts, and Pull Request workflows in GitHub/Bitbucket.

AWS CodePipeline & CodeBuild: Configuring buildspec.yml files and managing pipeline transitions.

Artifact Management: Understanding how build outputs are stored and versioned in S3 or ECR.

Bash/Shell: Navigating the terminal, managing file permissions, and writing basic automation scripts.

Python: The industry standard for AWS automation (using the boto3 library).

Linux Administration: Understanding the boot process, package management (yum/apt), and log file locations.

YAML/JSON: The foundation of CloudFormation.

Declarative Logic: Understanding that IaC describes the state of the world, not just a list of commands.

Professional Skills (The "Soft" Skills)

• "The Detective Mindset" (Troubleshooting): DevOps is 50% fixing things that broke. A graduate needs the patience to look at a 200-line error log and find the one line that matters.
• Documentation First: In DevOps, if it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist. They must be skilled at updating READMEs and Confluence pages so the team knows how a new pipeline works.
• Security‐Conscious Thinking: The "Shift Left" mentality. They should naturally ask, "Is this S3 bucket private by default?" or "Does this IAM role have too much power?"

The Selection Process

For first shortlisted candidates, we will be organising MS TEAMs interviews so we can get to know you more and you can ask us those important career questions. A F2F assessment centre will then follow, planned for either the 6th or 7th of May, in Hook, in Hampshire. This will give you the opportunity to meet your potential line manager, hear more about our company and role, and participate in some collaborative and individual exercises.

Your Academic Background?

Recent Bachelor’s degree in: Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Management Information Systems, or similar. Master’s degree (optional): Information Systems, or Engineering Management.

We’ve put everything in place to ensure you thrive. Competitive salaries, strong core values and an excellent benefits package that includes:

• Onsite parking
• Company Pension Scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• An Employee Assistance Programme
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, and adoption leave
• Access to trained Mental Health First Aiders
• Access to BCA Rewards which provides online and store discounts with a range of retailers
• And so much more...

We are proud to be Level 1 Disability Confident and committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible. Our policy is to employ the best qualified people and provide equal opportunity for the advancement of employees including promotion and training and not to discriminate against any person because of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, belief, or disability.