Senior Cloud Operations Engineer

Our client is an accounting and business software company.

The Cloud Operations DevOps teams are responsible and accountable for our client's online Product portfolio. The teams ensure our Products and Services are constantly available for our customers to use to run their businesses. A Cloud Operations Engineer participates in bridging the technical gaps between Development and Operations by deploying, administering, improving infrastructure, and improving automation using cloud technologies. The Cloud Operations Engineer is responsible for working in their team, ensuring their Products and Services remains available, secure and performant.

The Senior Cloud Operations Engineer has deep understanding and experience of working in a DevOps or SRE environment. They have demonstrated automation experience and multiple CI/CD implementations, working closely with product delivery teams, influencing their approach and design by deploying, administering, monitoring, and improving their service. Proactively, they will identify direct and indirect key partnerships required for each assigned project and/or operational deliverable and ensure their participation. This is a 24/7 operation that requires the Senior Cloud Operations Engineer to lead and resolve any service incidents that may arise and drive root cause analysis. Ability to quickly analyse, assess and contribute to technical decisions is key to the senior role.

*** Please note that this role is hybrid and will require you to work 3 days a week from our Newcastle office. ***

Key accountabilities and decision ownership:

• Take personal accountability for their products so that they remain available, secure and performant

• Use technology and knowledge to design and implement solutions and services to simplify customer experience, mitigate risk, improve usability and to impact our client's goals

• Full understanding of operational risk and accountability for delivering an excellent service to our customers

• Managing stakeholder expectations, ensuring accountability for all team members, making, and influencing decisions

• Drive best practices in CI/CD and product delivery pipeline

• The promotion of a DevOps/SRE culture and adoption of CI/CD principles throughout the organization

• Participate and run global initiatives

• Create, maintain, administer, and enhance cloud environments, ensuring they are secure and scalable, to satisfy operational requirements

• Ensure that any key non-functional requirements around availability, security and performance are met before any product is made available to customers

• Defining key metrics/logging and implement tooling that will provide all key stakeholders with information that will help identify improvements to the service on behalf of the customer

• Closely co-ordinate with product delivery teams to ensure that designs, standards, and quality can be implemented improving the customer experience

• Take the lead during high pressure incident scenarios, balancing technical resolution and senior stakeholder communications

• Communicate with key stakeholders on planned changes, incidents, and service improvement plans, influencing decisions on Product roadmaps

• Improve the out of hours customer experience by participating in our 24x7 on-call Rota

• Consistently reviewing and improving services, building individual and team backlogs with actions aligned to goals and OKRs. Working with the team to delegate and prioritise this work accordingly.

Skills, know-how and experience:

• Excellent communicator – able to articulate complex technical issues in simple terms when communicating with non-technical audience or our client business stakeholders

• Proven initiative as self starter, building team backlogs with good understanding of our Strategy and how that relates back to team priorities

• Operating Systems: Windows, Linux &/or MacOS.

• Strong analytical, debugging, and problem-solving skills.

• Scripting knowledge for task automation (PowerShell, Bash, Ruby, Python).

• Experience dealing with multiple teams in different functions/segments, multitasking & prioritisation skills.

• Exposure to Devops/SRE activities like – software/system engineering and toil reduction

• Experience building and maintaining Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD processes

• Experience with applications deployed in either AWS or Azure that are using distributed computing, containers, and serverless technologies.

• Technical leadership ability, influencing and interpersonal skills

• Proven ability in task automation, increasing efficiencies, costs savings and service reliability improvements

• Proven experience working with SDLC functional disciplines: QA, Development, design, etc.

• Previous experience working with Agile methodologies

• Proficiency in English language, verbal and written, with ability to build relationships and influence at all levels of the organisation including senior stakeholder management

Preferred:

• Extensive experience working in a Sysadmin, DevOps, SRE, IT Operations, Developer, or QA/Application Engineer or Similar Role, in a customer facing, complex technical environment

• Cloud Experience (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc.) experience

Technical / professional qualifications:

• It is preferable, but not essential, that the post holder be educated to degree level in a relevant subject OR has deep knowledge in area of expertise

• And/or Associate, and/or Professional level certifications in Cloud Technologies

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