Senior DevOps Engineer

External - All offers of employment are subject to satisfactory right‑to‑work checks. Candidates must be able to demonstrate their right to work in the UK. At the present time TfL is unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Hybrid working within this role enables a balance of 50 per cent of time split between the office and home over a 4‑week period. Hybrid working arrangements can evolve subject to business requirements.

Overview of project/role: This role is full, conventional, end‑to‑end DevOps; Development AND Operations. We aspire to fulfil the full DevOps cycle: Deploy > Operate > Monitor > Plan > Code > Build > Test > Release > Deploy. This role is not Development OF Operations; not limited to Azure DevOps, CI/CD and infrastructure automation. Operations and Support for a wide array of payments‑based systems both on‑prem and Azure, some of which are responsible for collecting half of TfL's entire annual budget, over GBP 5 Billion a year! Some C#/SQL Development experience is essential. Production incident management experience is essential.

The Senior DevOps Engineer delivers and integrates software to form a complete DevOps tool chain and is responsible for planning and designing large groups of stories, developing an effective DevOps tool chain to enable product delivery, providing coaching and mentoring to more junior colleagues and ensuring that deployment strategies for products are repeatable, scalable and highly available, having deep technical knowledge, providing support to delivery teams and solving complex problems, owning and being responsible for the overall delivery of work at any scale, being a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for and leading the onboarding of specific systems.

Key Accountabilities:

• Develops effective DevOps toolchains to enable product delivery, assure and implement deployment strategies and resolve issues to ensure services are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available.
• Lead the sharing of knowledge, documentation and good practice within the team and with related/interested teams and groups to foster innovation, promote continuous learning and growth.
• Identify and resolve complex issues preventing delivery or continuation of system support activities to achieve service level agreements (SLAs).
• Design and lead the tactics for building reusable templates and shared services and own the development of medium‑long term strategies for product lines within your Functional and Professional Communities.
• Lead one or more system's support providing technical leadership and guidance, creating a DevOps culture and implementing automation best practices.
• Participate in meetings / delivery events and follow processes defined for their team to ensure quality of work and efficiency of the team.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to more junior developers or peers to foster their professional growth, enhance their technical skills, and instil best practices in software development.
• Extensive knowledge of the principles and standards of Technology Products and Operations to ensure that work delivered is of high quality, well rounded, robust, very high performing, and meets the priorities set by the agile process.
• Provide development expertise and insight to support the effective evaluation of new technologies.
• Contribute to the development plans, forecasts and development estimates on software applications, to ensure projects can be planned in a consistent and timely fashion.
• Perform detailed reviews on code developed by peers to improve code quality, knowledge sharing and consistency.

Knowledge:

• Detailed knowledge of Azure cloud-based systems and resources.
• Detailed knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation tools.
• Detailed knowledge with configuration management tools.
• Detailed knowledge with CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps.
• Detailed knowledge with Agile frameworks including Scrum and Kanban.
• Detailed knowledge with Git version control and branching strategies, e.g. trunk‑based development, gitflow.
• Detailed knowledge of scripting languages such as PowerShell.
• Broad knowledge of cloud networking including VPC, subnets, security groups, peering, CIDR.
• Detailed knowledge of SQL Server RDBMS.

Skills:

• Working ability to manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets.
• Working ability in identifying process optimisation opportunities with guidance and contribute to the implementation of proposed solutions.
• Practitioner ability to design solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered with mitigation of security threats as a core feature.
• Practitioner ability to competently apply a modern standards approach and guide others to do so.
• Practitioner ability to review specifications and use the agreed standards and tools to design, code, test, correct and document programmes or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
• Practitioner ability in approaching prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes and testing.
• Practitioner ability to establish design patterns and iterate them while using a variety of prototyping methods and choose the most appropriate.
• Expert ability to see the bigger picture by taking groups of services, investigating how to get the best of underlying services.
• Expert ability to develop standards and procedures across a service product life cycle, including the development product life cycle, and can ensure adherence.
• Practitioner ability to define and design the integration build and co‑ordinate build activities and understands how to undertake and support integration testing activities.
• Expert ability to develop, implement, maintain and review systems and services to ensure delivery of professional excellence.
• Practitioner ability to work with stakeholders to set priorities, objectives and timescales while successfully delivering high quality outcomes that meet the customers’ needs and give value for money.
• Expert ability to identify risks and resolve issues efficiently.
• Involve a diverse range of colleagues, stakeholders and delivery partners in developing suggestions for improvements.

Experience:

• Detailed experience with automation and creating system & process efficiencies.
• Detailed experience in driving issue resolution and root cause identification.
• Broad experience with docker or similar containerization tool.
• Broad experience with appropriate CI/CD and deployment tools such as Azure DevOps.
• Detailed experience with static code analysis & security scanning pipelines and associated tooling.
• Expert experience designing and implementing centralised monitoring solutions including logging, monitoring, alerting.
• Experience with automated testing.
• Experience of solution trade‑offs such as cost, scope, timescale, and balance between long‑term strategic and short‑term pragmatic considerations.
• Broad experience of a major programming language such as C#.
• Detailed experience of maintaining and monitoring performance.

Application Process:

Please apply using your CV only. Think carefully about the skills, knowledge and experience in the advert and cover this in your CV. PDF format preferred and do not include any photographs or images.

Equality, diversity and inclusion:

We are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. We want to represent the city we serve, which will help us become a more innovative and efficient organisation. Our goal is to make our recruitment as inclusive as possible. We are a disability confident employer who guarantee an interview to any disabled candidate who meets all of the essential criteria. We also use anonymising software that removes identifying information from CVs and cover letters to make the process fair.

Benefits:

• Final salary pension scheme.
• Free travel for you on the TfL network.
• Reimbursement of 75% of the cost of a standard class Ticket for National Rail travel from home.
• 30 days annual leave plus public and bank holidays.
• TfL is committed to work‑life balance, operating a hybrid working approach where business and role requirements allow.
• Tax‑efficient cycle‑to‑work programme.
• Retail, health, leisure and travel offers.
• Discounted Eurostar travel.

We will make every effort to give you as much notice as possible, however some interviews/assessments could be organised at short notice.

Vetting Process:

At Transport for London, safety, trust and fairness sit at the heart of how we recruit. Our Vetting Charter explains the checks we carry out before you join us, helping ensure we create a safe, inclusive and reliable network for everyone who depends on our services. We simply ask that the information you provide is honest and accurate so we can progress your application smoothly. If something doesn’t match or can’t be verified, we may not be able to move forward with your application, but we’ll always treat you with transparency, respect, and clear communication throughout.