DevOps Engineer (with Systems Administration) in Watford

Salary: Up to £65,000 (depending on experience) + on call compensation

Location: Hertford

Applicants must hold a valid visa or work permit.

We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer / Systems Administrator to play a key role in shaping, maintaining, and evolving Zoocha’s cloud infrastructure and internal systems estate. This is a DevOps-first role with responsibility for both hands-on delivery and technical ownership across hosting platforms, CI/CD, and other internal systems. You will ensure that Zoocha’s infrastructure is secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned with best practice, while contributing to the ongoing evolution of our platform, tooling, and operational processes.

You will operate as a senior member of the DevOps team, taking ownership of critical systems, leading improvements, and supporting less experienced team members. You will also play a key role in evolving Zoocha’s use of AI-enabled tooling across DevOps and engineering workflows, ensuring that AI is used safely, effectively, and in alignment with our governance standards.

Why we are hiring:

As Zoocha continues to grow, the scale and complexity of our hosting platforms, operational tooling, and engineering workflows continues to increase. We are looking to strengthen the DevOps department with a senior engineer who can take ownership of key clients, contribute to strategic initiatives, and help evolve our overall DevOps capability as the organisation grows.

This role will help rebalance client and operational responsibilities across the team. By introducing additional senior DevOps Engineer / Systems Administrator capacity, we can ensure that operational responsibilities such as infrastructure provisioning, internal systems administration, and day-to-day DevOps activities are consistently owned and delivered, while maintaining momentum on platform evolution, security improvements, automation, and broader strategic initiatives.

The role also supports the wider strategic direction of the DevOps team by enabling continued investment in automation, security, developer experience, infrastructure consistency, and operational scalability across the organisation.

About Zoocha:

Founded in 2009, Zoocha is a leading Drupal specialist digital agency based in the UK, with offices in Spain and Brazil. Over 80 passionate thinkers, makers, and doers working across a range of disciplines including UX, strategy, design, development, hosting, project management, and support. We’re a friendly, lively, and fast-paced place to work, with regular team nights out and a wide range of social events on offer across our three offices – and we’re a certified Great Place to Work, too.

We’re certified in ISO 27001, ISO 27701, Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus, ICO, ISO 9001, ISO 22301, FSQS, JOSCAR, ISO 14001 and are Carbon Neutral Britain certified.

Our work and clients:

We build long-lasting, collaborative relationships with clients and push them, ourselves, and the world around us forward through the work we do together. With over 50 Drupal clients, our work is varied, but we have a focus on the not-for-profit, government, education, and travel sectors. Current clients include:

• University College London
• University of Portsmouth
• Oxfam
• Topdeck Travel
• Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
• Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust
• United Nations
• Ofsted

Key areas of responsibility:

• DevOps and Infrastructure Operations (Primary Focus): Taking ownership of defined operational infrastructure, hosting, and CI/CD responsibilities across Zoocha’s client and internal platforms, working collaboratively as part of the wider DevOps team. Managing infrastructure provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and operational support activities across cloud-hosted environments and associated tooling. Maintaining reliable, repeatable, and secure operational processes through the use of automation, infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, and standardised workflows. Monitoring infrastructure health and alerts, responding to operational issues appropriately, and escalating or coordinating wider investigation where required. Leading or contributing to operational incident investigation, troubleshooting, and resolution activities across infrastructure and hosting platforms. Supporting operational resilience through effective documentation, knowledge sharing, process improvement, and reduction of single points of dependency. Contributing to the ongoing evolution of Zoocha’s infrastructure standards, operational tooling, and hosting platform capabilities.
• CI/CD, Tooling and Platform Support: Managing, supporting and improving Zoocha’s CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, and associated operational platforms. Supporting reliable and consistent deployment workflows across development, staging, and production environments. Investigating and resolving infrastructure, deployment, and pipeline-related issues across client and internal platforms. Contributing to improvements in deployment reliability, operational efficiency, observability, and developer experience. Supporting the ongoing development and maintenance of automation, scripting, and operational tooling used across the DevOps function. Working collaboratively with development and QA teams to improve deployment consistency, release confidence, and platform usability.
• Monitoring, Security and Operational Readiness: Maintaining and improving infrastructure monitoring, alerting, logging, and operational visibility across Zoocha platforms. Supporting operational security activities, including patching, access management, configuration review, vulnerability remediation, and security hardening. Participating in operational incident response, root cause analysis, and service recovery activities in line with established DevOps and Service Desk processes. Supporting operational alignment with Zoocha’s ISO-certified Business Management Systems, including audit readiness, evidence gathering, and compliance-related operational controls. Contributing to operational resilience, service continuity, and platform reliability through proactive maintenance and continuous improvement activities.
• Developer Experience and Continuous Improvement: Participating in developer experience (DX) initiatives aimed at improving local development, deployment workflows, and operational tooling. Identifying opportunities to reduce manual effort through automation or improved processes. Contributing to Zoocha Continuous Improvement (ZCI) and Strategic Initiative (ZSI) workstreams where appropriate, particularly those related to DevOps tooling, platforms, or workflows.
• Systems Administration and Internal IT (Secondary Responsibility): Supporting the provisioning and lifecycle management of team member devices using Zoocha’s device management platforms (e.g., JumpCloud, Landscape). Administering internal SaaS platforms, including user access, permissions, and policy management. Managing endpoint security tooling, such as antivirus and endpoint protection platforms. Ensuring device, access, and system changes align with Zoocha’s security, governance, and compliance requirements. Maintaining accurate records and documentation for internal systems and assets.
• Compliance and Business Systems Support (as needed): Supporting operational aspects of Zoocha’s ISO-certified Business Management Systems, including evidence gathering and system checks. Assisting with Cyber Essentials Plus readiness from an operational and tooling perspective.

Preferred Experience:

• Infrastructure-as-Code tooling, particularly Terraform & Cloudformation
• CI/CD tooling and deployment automation, particularly GitHub Actions
• Linux systems administration and troubleshooting within cloud-hosted environments
• Strong Cloudflare experience, including DNS, WAF, caching, security, and CDN configuration
• AWS infrastructure and operational experience, with particular emphasis on: Systems Manager (SSM), RDSE, SEC2, CloudWatch, Bedrock (beneficial but less critical)
• AI-enabled tooling and operational workflows within engineering or DevOps environments
• Cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimisation tooling
• Awareness of Drupal or PHP-based application hosting environments and associated operational considerations

Mandatory requirements:

• UK-based and able to work effectively with teams across the UK, Spain and Brazil.
• Right to work in the UK: candidates must hold a valid visa or work permit.
• Strong written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate clearly and confidently across all levels of the organisation.
• Regular access to the Hertford office when needed.
• A commitment to confidentiality, professionalism and ethical handling of potentially sensitive information.
• No recruitment agencies - direct applications only.

Why work at Zoocha?

• Flexible working plus the ability to work from any of our offices (UK, Spain, Brazil) for periods of time.
• Outstanding benefits including profit share, private healthcare, gym, and wellness fund.
• Unlimited training budget.
• An inclusive workplace with active advocacy networks for women, LGBTQI employees, and people from ethnic minorities.
• Regular team socials and all-inclusive monthly social events.

We truly appreciate your interest in joining our team and thank you for taking the time to apply.