Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer in Bolton

Job Description Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer - 1 or 2 days a week expected at Head Office in Blackburn - Salary: £60k-£65k Summary of Position The Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer will be responsible for the administration, reliability, security and continuous improvement of the TW Group infrastructure estate across both Linux and Microsoft environments. This is a hands-on senior role for an experienced infrastructure engineer who is comfortable taking ownership of technical problems, investigating unfamiliar systems and delivering practical solutions with minimal supervision. The successful candidate will work closely with the Software Development Team, IT Operations and selected third-party technology partners to support business-critical infrastructure, development environments, databases, container platforms and deployment pipelines. The role will be expected to take ownership of day-to-day infrastructure operations while also improving automation, monitoring, resilience, documentation and disaster recovery capability across the wider IT estate. Key Responsibilities - Administration, maintenance and improvement of Linux and Microsoft server environments. - Provisioning and configuration of new virtual machines, servers, services and supporting infrastructure. - Deployment and configuration of applications and infrastructure components. - Monitoring the health, performance, availability and security of production and internal systems. - Investigating and resolving infrastructure incidents, performance issues and system failures. - Designing and implementing appropriate monitoring, alerting and logging for new and existing systems. - Managing and improving configuration automation using Ansible. - Supporting and administering containerised environments using Docker, CRI-O and Kubernetes. - Managing Kubernetes clusters, workloads, services and associated infrastructure. - Administration and operational support of MySQL, Galera Cluster and Microsoft SQL Server environments. - 1 Building, maintaining and improving CI/CD pipelines. - Supporting software deployment and release processes in collaboration with the Development Team. - Maintaining system patching, upgrades, security configuration and vulnerability remediation. - Managing backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes. - Improving infrastructure resilience and reducing key-person dependencies through documentation and cross-training. - Reviewing existing infrastructure and recommending improvements where systems can be made more reliable, secure, maintainable or efficient. - Supporting infrastructure-related security incidents and remediation activities. - Maintaining clear technical documentation covering systems, infrastructure, recovery procedures and operational processes. - Working with third-party infrastructure and technology partners where specialist support is required. - Supporting the broader IT function where infrastructure, systems or operational responsibilities overlap. Experience - 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Systems Administration, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering or a similar role. - Significant hands-on experience operating production-grade infrastructure. - Strong Linux administration experience. - Practical experience across both Linux and Microsoft server estates. - Proven experience managing infrastructure supporting business-critical applications. - Experience taking ownership of complex technical problems with limited supervision. - Proven ability to investigate unfamiliar systems and determine appropriate solutions. - Experience improving infrastructure reliability, automation, security or operational efficiency. - Previous experience operating in a senior or highly autonomous engineering role Skills and Experience - Core Linux & Systems Administration - Strong professional experience administering Linux server environments in production. - Strong understanding of Linux system administration, including: users and permissions system services package management networking storage and filesystems scheduled tasks logging performance management troubleshooting. - Experience provisioning and configuring servers and virtual machines from initial deployment through to production readiness. - Strong understanding of production infrastructure reliability, availability and operational support. - Experience with system patching, upgrades and lifecycle management. - Experience diagnosing complex infrastructure issues independently. Monitoring, Reliability & Security - Strong experience with system, application and security monitoring. - Experience designing and implementing monitoring and alerting for new infrastructure and applications. - Ability to identify meaningful service health indicators and c