Staff DevOps Engineer

We insure small businesses and enable big dreams – not just for our customers, but for our people and communities too. With over 1,000,000 active insurance policies, we protect builders, bakers, landlords and more than 1,200 other trades. We’re a technology company as well as one that sells insurance. That means we build, we fail, we learn and we improve. Through our global social impact strategy, called 'The Big Dreams Project’, we're working to help 10,000 small businesses start or grow by 2030.

We’re looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to join our team. In this role, you’ll have significant technical responsibility within a Platform Engineering team which consists of another 7 engineers and supports core elements of our Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Reporting into the DevOps Engineering Lead, this role will be central in delivering change and strategy in an agile and transparent way to the Internal Developer Platform (IDP). The role requires a team player who is highly technical, organised and has a passion for excellence. You will provide clarity on the PEST roadmap and priority of work which will align to the business needs and IDP goals. You will be hands-on in terms of delivering new features for our IDP and internal PaaS.

Here’s what you’ll be doing:

• Mentor, and Develop: Provide expert technical mentorship to grow the team’s skills and careers.
• Set and Execute Technical Vision: Partnering with our DevOps Engineering Lead you will design, architect and lead the implementation of our infrastructure roadmap.
• Systemic Improvement: Identifying system-wide bottlenecks, technical debt and inefficiencies; proposing solutions that result in significant improvements to developer productivity, security, reliability and cost.
• Champion a Modern DevOps Culture: Drive our principles of automation, self-service tooling and a "you build it, you run it" mindset.
• Complex Problem Solving: Remain hands-on and excel at identifying and solving the most ambiguous, high-impact technical problems.
• Elevate the Developer Experience (DevEx): Act as a key architect for our IDP, treating infrastructure as a product.

We’re looking for someone who is:

• An experienced mentor, passionate about developing engineers' technical expertise.
• A good communicator, with a technical and non-technical audience.
• A deep technical expert and architectural visionary, with a proven track record of designing and building scalable, resilient infrastructure.
• A modern DevOps evangelist who lives and breathes "infrastructure as code" and champions a culture of automation and security.
• Fluent in cloud-native technologies, with a profound, hands-on understanding of a major cloud provider like AWS.
• An automation specialist, highly proficient with tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• An early adopter of the latest technologies, using AI to bring DevOps culture and automation to the next level.

A few tasters of our recent roadmap:

• Adding GPU backed instance support to our ECS clusters to deliver a 10x improvement in inference time for our AI workloads.
• Adding ‘rainbow deployments’ to our existing blue/green and red/black options. This allows our Engineers to deploy multiple versions of their codebase to the live environment to allow real-time A/B testing of new features.
• Changing our ‘golden images’ for AMIs and containers from Amazon Linux 2 to Ubuntu and successfully rolling this out to hundreds of instances and thousands of containers with zero downtime.
• Adding auto injection of secrets to our instance and container runtimes to reduce the cognitive load of managing them per app and improve security by centralising standards.
• Building a tool to auto-generate IaC as part of the CI/CD pipeline using a DSL-like definition of the required infrastructure elements.

What are the benefits of working at Simply Business:

• We offer a great work-life balance where workloads are manageable and everyone has the flexibility to work hybrid.
• On top of the 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays), we offer the option to buy five more days of holiday with your flexible benefits.
• Our flexible parental leave allows you to approach an important time how you want - with six months full pay to the primary caregiver and four weeks full pay if you’re the secondary caregiver.
• Our life event leave is an extra day’s leave every two years for those big moments in your life like moving house or your birthday. Long-serving employees get a two-week paid sabbatical after five years of service, then four weeks off after ten years of service.
• Private medical insurance through BUPA, that covers any pre-existing condition is a core benefit. Plus a health cash plan that covers your everyday medical expenses.
• We offer a competitive salary based on your experience and the current market. Plus the potential to earn an annual bonus based on performance.

Simply Business is committed to providing equality and opportunities for all employees and candidates considering a career with us. We offer a workplace where colleagues are treated with respect and dignity. We don’t (and won’t) discriminate either directly or indirectly on the grounds of race, colour, religion, belief, political opinion, disability, nationality, ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation or relationship status at any stage of the hiring process or during the course of your employment.

At Simply Business, we insure small businesses and enable big dreams. Not just for our customers, but for our people, our communities and our environment. We believe a world-class company culture is crucial to achieving our business goals as we make insurance more accessible to small business owners. We’re building a better way to buy small business insurance, and we’re using technology to get the job done. That includes developing cutting-edge data gathering and analysis capabilities; living and breathing testing and experimentation; and harnessing the many benefits of AI and other emerging technologies.

We’re a values-led business. Our people all have a part to play in building a culture that lives these values: learning, empowerment, authenticity, pioneering, and simplicity.