Senior DevOps and System Engineer

Pearson Carter are currently supporting an established organisation as they continue to strengthen and develop their technology infrastructure. Due to continued growth and investment across their technical estate, they are looking to appoint an experienced Senior DevOps System Engineer who can take a lead role in the operation, optimisation and reliability of their production platforms. This position will suit an infrastructure specialist with strong experience across cloud environments, Linux systems and automation.

You'll be responsible for helping to ensure the organisation's platforms remain highly available, secure and performant, while also identifying and delivering improvements to the way infrastructure is deployed and managed. The role provides exposure to a broad range of technologies, including AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Linux, networking, CDN/WAF solutions, monitoring and CI/CD.

You'll collaborate closely with development and wider technical teams, contributing to projects as well as providing senior-level support for the existing production environment. If you're an experienced systems or infrastructure professional looking for a role where you can have real ownership and influence over a modern technology environment, this could be an excellent opportunity.

Responsibilities

• Own and manage core elements of the AWS estate, ensuring cloud infrastructure is secure, stable, scalable and appropriately maintained.
• Manage Linux-based production systems and investigate issues affecting the availability or performance of business-critical services.
• Maintain and support a variety of infrastructure and application technologies, including nginx, Apache, Redis, MariaDB/RDS, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch/Elasticsearch.
• Manage and improve CDN and web application protection services, with responsibility for platforms such as Akamai and Cloudflare.
• Build, maintain and enhance infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, helping to standardise and simplify the management of environments.
• Use Ansible to automate configuration, provisioning and routine administration across infrastructure platforms.
• Assist with the design, maintenance and improvement of automated deployment pipelines, including Bitbucket Pipelines.
• Maintain effective monitoring and alerting across infrastructure and applications using Zabbix, AWS CloudWatch, Pingdom and New Relic.
• Take ownership of significant production incidents, working methodically to identify root causes and restore services as quickly as possible.
• Follow incidents through to completion and implement longer-term fixes to improve system stability and reduce recurring problems.
• Look for ways to automate repetitive operational processes and reduce unnecessary manual administration.
• Create and maintain practical tooling and automation using Python and Bash.
• Work with colleagues across infrastructure, development and other technical functions to improve security, resilience and overall system performance.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of infrastructure standards, processes and operational practices.
• Participate in the company's 24/7 out-of-hours on-call rota.

Experience

• 5 years of professional experience in Systems Engineering, Infrastructure, DevOps or Senior Systems Administration roles.
• Strong commercial experience administering and supporting Linux production environments.
• Demonstrable hands-on knowledge of AWS, particularly services including EC2, VPC and load balancing.
• Experience managing production infrastructure supporting web applications and databases.
• Familiarity with technologies such as nginx, Apache, Redis, MariaDB/RDS, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch/Elasticsearch.
• Solid infrastructure-as-code experience, with Terraform used in a professional production environment.
• Practical knowledge of Ansible, including automated configuration and provisioning.
• Experience developing scripts and automation using Python and Bash.
• Previous exposure to the administration or support of CDN and WAF technologies; experience with Akamai would be advantageous.
• Understanding of modern CI/CD practices, with experience using Bitbucket Pipelines or a similar platform.
• A proven track record of investigating infrastructure incidents, troubleshooting complex issues and carrying out root-cause analysis.
• Strong technical problem-solving skills and the ability to investigate issues logically and efficiently.
• Good communication skills, with the confidence to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders when required.
• Self-motivated and capable of working independently while managing competing priorities.
• Comfortable operating in a production environment where reliability and response times are important.
• Willingness to participate in a rotating 24/7 on-call arrangement.

Salary

Salary is dependent on experience and will go up to £75k.

Location

This role is fully remote but has an office in Scotland. Applicants must have the legal right to work in the UK.

Benefits

Annual performance bonus. Employee profit share. Company pension. Health.