AWS and Azure infrastructure engineer with open source software agency experience

As a DevOps engineer, with AWS and Azure cloud experience, at Affinity your work will be extremely varied, challenging and hopefully very rewarding! We have a well-established and growing list of high-profile clients, who we have excellent relationships with and to whom we always endeavour to deliver the highest quality of service.

We are looking for someone who is passionate about technology and who is always looking for opportunities to improve the services we provide for clients, in areas such as efficiency, cost effectiveness, security and reliability.

Consistent with the DevOps philosophy, we aim for all DevOps focussed team members to work as closely as possible with the more application focussed team members. You'll be pivotal in knowledge sharing internally within the business, assisting others in their assigned projects and, where necessary, supporting more junior members of Affinity to help them learn and improve.

The right DevOps engineer will have the opportunity to help grow and shape this emerging function within the team, creating a long-term career path for themselves within Affinity, with an opportunity to progress upwards., * As one of our DevOps engineers you will be working on projects, such as the Cabinet Office WordPress support contract, to keep our clients' systems up-to-date, available, resilient, secure, performing well and cost effective.

• Working to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure related processes so that we can continue to support the large number of services that we are now responsible for.

• At times you'll need to work together with clients' own internal teams and with any external infrastructure teams that Affinity may partner with.

• Contributing to the process when Affinity are competing for new work, putting together infrastructure designs and proposals which help us to win that work.

• Putting together infrastructure design documents at the start of projects, with a view to getting these signed off by the client and then acting as the basis for infrastructure build.

• Building infrastructure on new projects through the use of Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, etc. This will also include continuous integration processes, server provisioning, etc.

• Imparting knowledge and experience to other Affinity team members, both verbally and also captured in tools such as Jira Confluence, where we would like to build up a repository of DevOps how-tos, best practices, etc.

• Opportunity to work as a team lead where other Affinity team members are involved in DevOps.

• Providing AWS and Azure thought leadership and mentoring in both advisory and delivery contexts, focusing on the requirements of our clients' customers and how these are best served by continuous improvements to our hosting approach.

• Supporting out-of-hours rotas to provide support coverage for contracts in place with Affinity.

• Full-time role, 37.5 hours per week to cover core business hours (9-5, Mon-Fri)
• Willingness to provide on-call rota coverage of emergency support (24/7/365)
• Ability to work flexible hours from time to time, for specific projects or tasks
• UK based and resident in UK for last 3 years (given some client-driven security clearance requirements)
• The role is fully remote, though visits to clients and to our office in Cornwall will occasionally be required

Technical must-haves

• Commercial experience of AWS, including services such as Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS/EKS, Amazon EFS, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS Cost Explorer, etc.
• Commercial experience of Azure, including services such as Azure Networking, Azure Cache (Redis and Memcached), App Services (running WordPress and .NET applications), Front Doors (CDN), API Services, storage services (blob storage, file storage, etc.), Azure Database services, Azure Cost Management, etc.
• Terraform and/or CloudFormation scripting
• Linux, Apache/Nginx
• Continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) experience including GitHub Actions
• Familiarity with the AWS/Azure Well-Architected Framework and NCSC Cloud Security Principles
• Security experience, including the resolution of issues found during penetration testing
• Docker experience

Technical nice-to-haves

• System/server admin experience
• Drupal, WordPress or Magento experience
• PHP and Composer
• Microsoft technologies, including .NET, Windows Server, IIS, Active Directory, MSSQL, etc.
• AWS certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, DevOps Engineer - Professional, speciality certifications, e.g., Database, Security, etc.)
• Microsoft certifications, including Azure Fundamentals, Azure Administrator Associate, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Azure Security Engineer Associate, etc.
• Load testing experience, including jMeter, Gatling, K6, etc.
• Other HashiCorp tools, e.g., Packer, Vault, Vagrant, Consul, etc.
• Provisioning tools, e.g., Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.
• AWS Control Tower and/or Landing Zone
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates

• We understand that our people are our business and that is reflected in our commitment to them
• We understand the importance of flexibility, wellness, performance and satisfaction - indeed it is part of our culture
• We offer opportunities to take unpaid leave and will give you one extra day's holiday for every year you've worked with us, for up to 8 years
• We know working from home introduces opportunities for you to do more domestic chores during the day, e.g. picking up the children from school, taking pets to the vet, etc. We don't mind this at all, as long as we are aware of what you are dong and the work gets done!
• Exciting times with committed people, growing the business in an exciting arena...

Small business, big clients

Affinity is a small business with a growing team of 33+, but we read like a big business with ISO 27001 and 9001 accreditations, as well as Cyber Essentials Plus and Investors in People. Our client list is small but the envy of many a company, with a healthy mix of blue chip private and central government public sector clients, ranging from the Timpson Group and Vision Financial Services to the Cabinet Office, Education Scotland and the NCA. There is never a dull moment here, working at pace on deeply challenging enterprise projects that really make a difference!!

The benefits of our Location even when working remotely!!

What more of an excuse to visit one of England's finest counties do you need than one of our famous table tennis or darts tournaments. We know it may be harder these days, but we are finding other ways to build in breathers and firebreaks for all our colleagues wherever they are around the UK.

Cornwall is a fantastic setting for our staff outings - perhaps meeting on the beach or out on the water - definitely worth a long drive and a weekend away for those colleagues living farther afield!