Digital Experience - Lead DevOps Engineer

As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for providing leadership and technical expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining our Cloud Infrastructure practices. You will play a critical role in shaping the infrastructure, deployment processes, and automation strategies for our web-based projects (mainly websites, web platforms and API middleware solutions using open-source frameworks). This position requires a combination of technical prowess and strategic thinking, and effective team management. We manage a variety of applications on different stacks which includes AWS, Azure, Git, Docker, Cloudflare and Terraform.  Experience with these technologies is required and considered a valuable asset for this role.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership and Delivery Oversight

• Collaborate with project managers to ensure accountable and efficient technical delivery across various projects in terms of quality and efficiency.
• Lead technical discussions during client calls, ensuring clear specifications are captured, and projects are delivered within the agreed commercial parameters.

Team Management and Development

• Manage and cultivate a high-performing team of engineers, actively participating in their growth and development.
• Coach team members alongside other leads and senior engineers, contributing to skill enhancement and career progression.
• Collaborate with project managers to plan team schedules, participate in recruitment activities, and manage team performance through KPIs.

Project Oversight and Escalation Handling

• Monitor the efficiency of engineers within the team and projects, proactively identifying and addressing issues.
• Act as an escalation point on projects, providing technical guidance, addressing scope creep, and collaborating with the PMO to ensure project delivery stays on track.
• Define and support teams with scoping, cloud architecture design, and overall project delivery.

Standards and Best Practices

• Establish and enforce best practices (i.e. “Well-Architected”), setting high standards for engineering across the business.
• Responsible for the infrastructure security through our ISO27001 and security policies.
• Collaborate with the QA and PMO teams to assess risks, understand delivery impacts, and formulate plans to mitigate these risks.

Long-Term Planning and Technical Strategy

• Create technical plans and roadmaps for long-term clients, ensuring alignment with organisational goals and client expectations.
• Support pitches and collaborate with the New Business team to win technical projects.
• Assist the CTO, Head of engineering and other tech leads in defining and establishing quality and security standards.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify skill gaps and training needs within the team, reporting these to the head of the department for appropriate action.
• Actively contribute to the team's well-being, fostering a positive and collaborative working environment.

Experience and skills

• We’re looking for applicants with skills and experience in the following areas:
• At least 2-3 years of experience in a similar role.
• Experience with technology stacks such as AWS, Azure, Git, Docker, Cloudflare and Terraform.
• Experience deploying and maintaining solutions mostly utilising the Laravel, Drupal and NextJS.
• Experience building and optimising high performance technology at scale.
• Passion as an open source technologist, with good working knowledge of common open source technologies. (E.g. Red Hat Linux, Amazon Linux, Debian, git, SSH, rsync, nginx, apache, etc)
• Familiarity and experience with core Information Security principles and ISO 27001 accreditation (E.g. threat modelling, compartmentalisation, separation of concerns, principle of least privilege, etc)
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.