DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer

£40,000 - £45,000

We’re looking for a Mid-Level DevOps Engineer to join our talented Development team in Newcastle. You’ll be playing a key role in rearchitecting our systems to be cloud native in AWS, setting up our company for continued growth and empowering our developers to build higher quality products at speed.

A little bit about us

We are a tech business that bundle household bills into one fixed monthly payment. One payment means easier finances, less time on the phone to suppliers, and less admin. It’s a game changer.

It’s also a gorgeous place to work. Everybody gets stuck in to make things work, the team will make you feel welcome from day one, and the office is near some pretty great pubs.

What you’ll be doing?

As a team we are very passionate about continuous improvement and you will play a key role in these efforts! You’ll be working closely with the current Principal DevOps Engineer & Junior DevOps Engineer and our development team consisting of 14 full-stack engineers and 3 UI/UX designers.

We have a variety of projects, from internal operational systems for employees, external web applications for our customers and public REST APIs used by other companies. The majority of our systems are built on Linux, Nginx, PHP, VueJS, MariaDB & Redis. Our company and customer base is growing rapidly each year, requiring our systems to scale, become more secure and more reliable, which is a large initiative you will be helping drive.

You will be working closely with DevOps & our developers to:

1. Re-architect and migrate our systems to AWS, taking advantage of AWS services and containerisation via an infrastructure-as-code approach to take our technology stack to the next level.
2. Achieve new capabilities across our products to drive higher software delivery and organisational performance. We’re big fans of DORA’s research in these areas!
3. Provide your expertise when developers are tackling complex features with non-functional requirements or resolving production issues. We’re a very collaborative team and you will often find yourself embedded alongside developers on projects.

You can get an idea of what we’ve been working on recently by checking out our Engineering Blog.

A little bit about you

We need you to:

1. Have one of the following:
   1. A Computer Science related degree and at least 2-3 years of real world experience in a DevOps role.
   2. At least 4-5 years of relevant commercial experience - We’d love to hear from Backend Developers wanting to transition into DevOps too!
2. Have experience building production systems in AWS (preferably using Infrastructure as Code like CloudFormation, Terraform or CDK).
3. Have prior programming experience (preferably PHP, JavaScript or Python).
4. Be comfortable leading initiatives that require collaboration with developers.
5. Care about the non-functional requirements - security, performance, reliability, but appreciate when to strike a balance.
6. Have experience with containerization tools like Docker.
7. Be familiar with CI/CD tools like GitLab CI and the Git underpinnings.
8. Have experience administering Linux operating systems & services.
9. Be comfortable automating processes, whether via shell scripting or integrations.
10. Have experience running databases, web servers and in-memory caches.
11. Be excellent understanding of fundamental networking principles and the HTTP protocol.

We’d like you to have:

1. AWS Certifications.
2. Experience building, testing and deploying PHP systems.
3. Experience with Amazon ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, Lambda.
4. Previously worked on migration projects.
5. Used Ansible or other configuration management tools.
6. Implemented or used monitoring tools (e.g. Datadog, Sentry, Prometheus) to solve performance problems.
7. Understanding of security principles and confident assisting with security issues.

These skills are preferable, training and development opportunities will be available for any areas you are not yet familiar with.

What you’ll get from us

£40,000 - £45,000 (depending on your experience) + an annual uplift.

25 days holiday each year, plus the usual bank holidays. Too many? Too few? You can buy or sell up to 5 per year.

Access to our shiny employee discounts platform, Magpie.

Up to £1500 for direct business benefit learning of your choice.

A paid volunteering day with our chosen charities or a charity close to your heart.

Access to Simply Health for 24/7 access to private GP and counselling services and much more health benefits.

Saving you money on your commute to work with our nifty corporate travel with Nexus and Go North East.

Prefer two wheels? Get yourself a new set with our Cycle to Work scheme.

Enhanced Pension Contributions once you’ve been with us for 3 years.

Free independent mortgage advice from Charles Cameron & Associates.

Lots of socials like our weekly football and badminton games, team activities and fundraising events to support our chosen charities Newcastle West End Foodbank and Newcastle Dog and Cat Shelter - do you see yourself as the Bob Ross of our next paint & sip night or taking the crown in our annual table tennis competition?

We are also proud sponsors of our neighbours Ouseburn Community Farm which means we get to walk their goats.

Next Steps

The interview process will involve a 30 minute phone call followed by an in-person interview at our Office in Ouseburn.

Applications must include:

1. A cover letter.
2. CV.
3. Link to portfolio, blog or relevant GitHub project(s) if available.