Software Engineering Specialist

About the role

As a Senior Ops Engineer, you will be a hands-on technical expert driving the day-to-day operational needs of the platform and the developers that use it. Working collaboratively across teams, you will develop and implement automated solutions, address operational challenges, and ensure the platform's robust performance and security. This role demands strong technical acumen, a proactive mindset, and the ability to influence platform improvements through technical excellence.

What you’ll be doing

Platform Reliability and Security 

Ensure the platform meets performance, availability, and reliability SLOs. 

Proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and risks in production environments. 

Maintain and improve monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks to detect and prevent incidents. 

Securing the platform using vendor and in-house best practices 

Incident Management 

Act as the primary responder for critical incidents, ensuring rapid mitigation and resolution. 

Conduct post-incident reviews and implement corrective actions to prevent recurrence. 

Develop and maintain detailed runbooks and playbooks for operational excellence. 

Automation and Efficiency 

Build and maintain tools to automate routine tasks, such as deployments, scaling, and failover. 

Contribute to CI/CD pipeline improvements for faster and more reliable software delivery. 

Write and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Pulumi or Terraform to provision and manage resources. 

Contribute to cost optimisation efforts, tuning of deployments to make most efficient use of compute resources.  

Collaboration and Mentorship 

Collaborate with SRE, CI/CD, Developer Experience, and Templates teams to improve the platform’s reliability and usability. 

Mentor junior engineers by sharing knowledge and best practices in SRE and operational excellence. 

Partner with developers to facilitate resolution of application tuning, securing and networking.  

Provide code reviews for others 

Observability and Metrics 

Implement and optimize observability tools like Dynatrace, Prometheus, or Grafana for deep visibility into system performance. 

Define key metrics and dashboards to track the health and reliability of platform components. 

Continuously analyse operational data to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. 

Building alerts for integration into pager duty / Dynatrace.  

Supporting the Developers  

Providing support to our developers, resolving build, test and deployment issues. 

Troubleshooting network issues  

Writing documentation on use / behaviour of the platform 

On-Call support for pager duty incidents on the platform (usually one week in every 8 or so)  

Essential Skills / Experience

• 5+ years of experience in building and operating enterprise platforms for production in an agile development environment.  
• Demonstrated expertise in managing cloud-based environments, with 3+ years of experience in AWS. 
• Strong programming skills in one or more languages: Python, Shell, TypeScript etc. 
• 3+ years experience managing containerization and orchestration technologies (i.e. Kubernetes & Helm). 
• Proficiency in CI/CD practices and tools, such as GitLab, Jenkins, or similar. 
• Familiarity with monitoring, logging, and alerting tools 
• Familiarity with code promotion processes and software lifecycles.  
• Experience participating in and contributing to agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, refinement and retrospectives.  

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Strong knowledge of build and test tools such as: maven, npm, yarn, gradle, sonarqube, linters etc. 
• Good git skills, ability to rebase / cherry pick etc. easily 
• Knowledge of developer frontends such as backstage or port.  
• Good experience debugging network / communication issues