Lead DevOps / SRE Engineer

This is a Permanent, Full Time vacancy. We’re building an inclusive work environment. Here at Zen, your gender, race, ethnicity, neurodiversity, disability, sexuality, subculture, size, introversion, extraversion, family background and everything else that shapes you does matter to us. Because they matter to you and are part of who you are. We’re interested in you as an individual and here you’ll find opportunities to develop, be recognised and hopefully enjoy yourself along the way. We are always happy for you to enquire about part-time, flexible working or reasonable adjustments, and we will support wherever possible.

About the role: You will be responsible for managing a small team of experienced DevOps/SRE Engineers, to support, maintain, and consistently improve the development estate so the development teams can focus and innovate constantly to drive Zen’s business and the teams’ priorities. Reporting to the engineering manager, you must have an excellent track record in a DevOps or better SRE role and have a genuine interest in developing your Line Management experience. Zen are committed to investing in and developing you – we believe that leaders have a huge impact on our people and play a vital part in our success.

Objectives:

• Build an effective DevOps/SRE team capable of supporting Zen’s development function.
• Comfortable leading to drive measurable improvement using SRE techniques and practices.
• Build quality practices and frameworks to allow developers to focus.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to Software and DevOps Engineer peers.
• Be a technical escalation point and eventually be part of a 24/7 escalation rota.
• Document as you go – to support colleagues.
• Drive tasks forward with energy and enthusiasm.
• Create proactive monitoring solutions using standard tooling.
• Conduct RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for incidents.
• Develop and maintain self-managing infrastructure services and dashboards.
• Define the metrics of success and report on progress.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code for continuous service improvement.
• Identify cost-saving opportunities.

Key Responsibilities:

• Management experience is preferred but not essential for a strong SRE Engineer with aspirations to step into team leadership.
• Several years of DevOps experience ideally in an ISP, Telco or other Managed Services environment.
• Comfortable working with automation tools (Puppet, Azure DevOps, Git).
• Worked in complex networking and firewall environments.
• Demonstratable experience in dealing with technical debt effectively.
• Very strong problem-solving skills are essential.
• Patient & friendly with excellent interpersonal skills.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Azure DevOps).
• AWS hands-on experience.
• Strong troubleshooting and diagnosis skills.
• Able to write documentation that covers what your peers and operations need to know.

Interpersonal Skills: We value interpersonal skills and responsible teamwork. You should be able to:

• Influence and lead.
• Support teammates.
• Take and give feedback to tune future actions and behaviours.
• Embrace and demonstrate Zen values and our happiness objectives.
• Be kind, understanding, and listen to others.
• Be organised.
• Have strong attention to detail.

About Zen: At Zen, we’re proud to do things differently. As the largest independently owned, and B Corp accredited, telecommunications and technology service provider in the UK, we strive for long-term goals that are aligned to our happiness objectives and driven by our desire to have a positive impact on our people, our customers, our partners, and the planet.

We believe that business should be a force for good and we’re committed to improving the lives of our people, creating a better future through our community, charity and D&I work, and to make sure we look after our environment.