devops engineer in life reinsurance

Pacific Life Re is a global life reinsurance company undergoing a major back-office transformation. Its Divisional Data Team develops and manages an enterprise-wide data solution, reporting services, and data governance practices.

Responsibilities:

• Own the Azure DevOps organisation and project configuration for the Divisional Data Team, including projects, teams, security groups, service connections, variable groups and secure files.
• Administer permissions and access models across repositories, pipelines, artefacts and libraries.
• Manage build agents, including self-hosted agent pools, capacity, scaling and patching.
• Use Azure Boards to plan, track and report DevOps work and integrate work items with commits, pull requests and releases.
• Manage Azure Artifacts feeds, package versioning and retention policies.
• Define, document and enforce branching strategies, naming conventions and promotion paths.
• Set and maintain branch policies, approval workflows, build validation and merge strategies.
• Own the pull request process, including review standards and approval routing.
• Define release branching, tagging, versioning, hotfix and emergency fix processes.
• Maintain merge conflict resolution, rebase, cherry-pick and rollback standards.
• Create, structure and maintain repositories, documentation requirements and repository standards.
• Manage repository security, protected branches, forks and cross-repository dependencies.
• Implement and maintain pre-commit and pre-merge quality gates.
• Manage repository hygiene, retention, archiving and repository migration.
• Prevent secrets and credentials from being committed to source control through scanning and remediation.
• Design, build and maintain YAML-based CI/CD pipelines for Snowflake SQL, dbt models, Streamlit applications, stored procedures and supporting scripts.
• Own database change management and operate state-based deployment across development, SIT, UAT and production.
• Maintain reproducible environments and infrastructure-as-code across environments.
• Implement automated testing, deployment gates, approvals and post-deployment validation.
• Ensure rollback and recovery mechanisms for failed deployments.
• Own the end-to-end release calendar and release process for the data platform.
• Coordinate with delivery, testing and business stakeholders.
• Chair or represent the team at change advisory and release approval forums.
• Prepare and submit change records, including ECRs, with appropriate evidence.
• Manage release readiness, environment lock-downs, dependencies and go/no-go decisions.
• Maintain an auditable release trail linking requirements, code, approvals and deployments.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews and drive improvements in deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore.
• Own RBAC design and administration across Snowflake and Azure DevOps.
• Implement and maintain data masking and PII controls.
• Manage certificate renewals, artefact repository configuration and remediation of security scanning findings.
• Embed IT controls and Business Control compliance requirements into delivery and release processes.
• Collaborate with data engineering, testing, reporting, architecture and IT infrastructure teams.

Requirements:

• Deep hands-on expertise with Azure DevOps, including Repos, YAML Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, self-hosted agents and service connections.
• Expert-level Git skills covering branching strategies, branch policies, pull request workflows, tagging, versioning, merging, rebasing, cherry-picking and rollback.
• Strong experience designing and running automated production deployment pipelines in controlled and audited environments.
• Demonstrable release management experience, including change control, release governance and stakeholder coordination.
• Experience with database change management tooling and state-based deployment approaches.
• Strong knowledge of Snowflake administration, RBAC, masking policies and cost/performance optimisation.
• Experience with dbt and SQL in a modern cloud data warehouse environment.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, PowerShell, Bash or Python scripting, and monitoring and alerting tools.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Appropriate technical skill for the role and awareness of current issues affecting the profession and the life reinsurance industry.
• Responsibility for the quality, completeness and accuracy of own work and the team’s work.
• Ability to prioritise competing requests and deadlines.
• Ability to provide accurate and timely status updates and escalate issues appropriately.
• Open, fair and collaborative approach to sharing information, knowledge and experience.
• Clear and practical verbal and written communication without over-reliance on technical language.
• Ability to challenge existing practices and evaluate current ways of working critically.
• Flexibility and resourcefulness in a changing environment with challenging deadlines.
• Ability to work effectively with people with diverse skills and experience.
• Agile approach and ability to think ahead and focus on the end goal.

Nice to have:

• Understanding of networking, certificates and security scanning tools, knowledge of reinsurance or insurance industry concepts.

Conditions:

• 25 Days of annual leave with the option to buy or sell additional days.
• Adoption and fertility leave.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Private insurance coverage for the employee and dependents.
• Group Life Insurance coverage of 9x basic annual salary.
• Group Income Protection up to 75% of basic annual salary.
• Optical benefits.
• 15% Combined employee/employer savings and retirement contributions.
• Subsidised gym membership.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Cycle to Work and Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme.
• Time off for volunteering.
• Charitable matching of employee donations.
• Team building days, social activities and wellbeing initiatives.

Benefits apply only to permanent and fixed-term employees.