Senior DevOps Engineer

Role: Senior DevOps Engineer

Location: Reading or Leeds (Hybrid 1 day per week onsite)

Salary: £80k - £85k

Active SC Clearance required

We are looking for an experienced DevOps Engineer to join a high-performing team delivering fully automated, continuous deployment solutions. You will play a key role in building, maintaining, and improving infrastructure and deployment pipelines, while collaborating across development, QA, and operations teams.

This is an exciting opportunity to work in a modern, cloud-based environment using industry-leading tools and practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement automated build and deployment pipelines for Java-based microservices
• Contribute to version-controlled configuration assets within a fully automated CI/CD environment
• Diagnose and troubleshoot infrastructure and deployment issues
• Collaborate with development, QA, and operations teams to deliver reliable software services
• Act as a key liaison between management, technical teams, and operations
• Identify and implement automation opportunities that drive business value
• Support large-scale CI/CD and source code management implementations
• Monitor project progress and provide technical guidance where required
• Build strong working relationships with internal teams and third-party suppliers
• Work within an Agile delivery environment
• Create and maintain lightweight technical documentation
• Mentor and support junior team members

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong experience with CI/CD tools and practices (Jenkins, Git/GitLab)

• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)

• Proven experience building automation frameworks using Ansible

• Hands-on experience with AWS services, including:

• EC2, S3, Lambda

• EKS (Kubernetes)

• API Gateway, ALB

• Auto Scaling

Solid understanding of Linux systems, networking, and security hardening

Experience with containerisation and orchestration (Kubernetes, preferably EKS)

Strong scripting/programming skills (eg, Python, Groovy, Shell, Perl)

Knowledge of Git branching strategies and source control management

Experience with automated testing tools (eg, Cucumber, ReadyAPI)

Experience managing and scaling distributed systems in AWS environments

Familiarity with deployment strategies and release management approaches

Understanding of development concepts (REST APIs, JSON, YAML)

Experience integrating quality gates (eg, SonarQube, regression testing) into pipelines

Desirable Skills

• Experience with Jira or similar issue tracking tools
• Knowledge of HashiCorp Packer (AMI creation) and Vault (secrets management)
• Familiarity with messaging systems (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ)
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools (Elastic Stack, AppDynamics)

• Strong experience with CI/CD tools and practices (Jenkins, Git/GitLab)

• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)

• Proven experience building automation frameworks using Ansible

• Hands-on experience with AWS services, including:

• EC2, S3, Lambda

• EKS (Kubernetes)

• API Gateway, ALB

• Auto Scaling

Solid understanding of Linux systems, networking, and security hardening

Experience with containerisation and orchestration (Kubernetes, preferably EKS)

Strong scripting/programming skills (eg, Python, Groovy, Shell, Perl)

Knowledge of Git branching strategies and source control management

Experience with automated testing tools (eg, Cucumber, ReadyAPI)

Experience managing and scaling distributed systems in AWS environments

Familiarity with deployment strategies and release management approaches

Understanding of development concepts (REST APIs, JSON, YAML)

Experience integrating quality gates (eg, SonarQube, regression testing) into pipelines

Desirable Skills

• Experience with Jira or similar issue tracking tools
• Knowledge of HashiCorp Packer (AMI creation) and Vault (secrets management)
• Familiarity with messaging systems (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ)
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools (Elastic Stack, AppDynamics)