DevOps Engineer

12-Month contract – Inside IR35 – market rate

Manchester based – hybrid working – 2-3 days a week onsite

Banking sector

Key accountabilities

• Kubernetes and OpenShift engineering. Builds, configures, secures and operates Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters and workloads for core banking, with attention to resilience and availability.
• Infrastructure as code. Designs and maintains Terraform modules and environments, with code review, testing and safe promotion.
• Internal developer platform. Builds and improves the IDP, including Backstage catalogue, software templates, plugins and golden paths, so product teams can self-serve safely.
• Continuous delivery. Designs and maintains delivery pipelines that build, test, secure and deploy core banking services reliably.
• Observability. Implements metrics, telemetry, logging, tracing and alerting, defines SLIs and SLOs with service owners, and automates runbooks.
• Platform engineering. Treats the platform as a product, improving its reliability, usability and cost with feedback from the teams that use it.
• Control engineering. Builds the bank's resilience, security, change and audit controls into platforms and pipelines as automated, evidenced checks.
• Contribution to the team. Mentors junior engineers and shares knowledge.

Responsibilities

Platform and delivery

• Builds and runs Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms, including cluster configuration, upgrades, capacity, networking, storage, security policy, operators and multi-tenant namespaces.
• Writes and maintains Terraform modules and environments across cloud and platform resources, with state management, testing and review.
• Builds and improves Backstage, including software templates, catalogue entries, plugins and documentation, and works with product teams to adopt them.
• Designs and maintains CI/CD pipelines with build, test, security scanning, artefact management, deployment strategies and rollback, using tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Harness, Tekton or Argo CD.
• Supports releases of core banking services, and works with development, testing, security and operations teams.
• Treats the platform as a product, collecting feedback, measuring adoption and improving the experience for the teams that use it.
• Troubleshoots complex platform and delivery problems, and takes part in the on-call rota.

Observability and reliability

• Implements metrics, telemetry, logging, tracing and alerting using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry, and keeps alerts actionable.
• Defines SLIs and SLOs with service owners, builds SLO dashboards, and uses error budgets to guide improvement work.
• Turns runbooks into automation, such as automated diagnosis and remediation for common alerts.
• Plans capacity, performance and resilience, and tests failover and recovery.
• Takes part in incident response and post-incident reviews, and follows up the actions.

Control engineering, team and development

• Builds the bank's resilience, security, change and audit controls into platforms and pipelines, using policy as code, automated scanning, approval gates and evidence capture.
• Works with risk, security, architecture and audit teams to turn control requirements into automated, testable checks.
• Follows the bank's security, regulatory and change management standards.
• Reviews peers' code, pipelines and infrastructure changes.
• Mentors junior engineers, and shares knowledge across the team.
• Invests in their own development by working within the existing development framework.

Experience

• Several years of professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering or site reliability engineering, running production systems.
• Strong hands-on experience of Kubernetes or OpenShift.
• Strong hands-on experience of Terraform and continuous delivery pipelines.
• Experience of observability, including metrics, alerting and SLOs, and of automating operational tasks.
• Experience of building automated checks and controls into delivery and platforms.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach within an Agile team.
• Experience in a regulated environment such as a Tier 1 bank, and with core banking or other critical systems.
• Experience of Backstage or another internal developer platform.
• Experience of GitOps, policy as code and supply chain security.
• Certification such as CKA, CKS, Red Hat OpenShift or Terraform Associate, or a cloud certification.
• Experience of running a platform used by many product teams.
• Experience of mentoring or onboarding less experienced engineers.

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