Lead DevOps Engineer

We are looking for an experienced Lead DevOps Engineer to join our innovative, successful and collaborative Cloud Engineering team.

We play an important role in the successful growth and expansion across the Wessex Water business and wider YTL Group.

This role is based at our Claverton Down office in Bath, with hybrid working available. You will need to be located within a commutable distance, as working collaboratively with our engineering teams and business stakeholders is key to this role.

What you'll do 

As the most senior hands-on engineer within Cloud Engineering, you will provide technical leadership across complex, business-critical Azure services without taking on formal people management.

You will set the engineering standards and patterns that teams across Technology build to, and you will be accountable for the quality of the technical decisions made within them.

Day-to-day, your responsibilities will include:

• establishing, maintaining and assuring the engineering standards, patterns and designs used across Technology, including CI/CD and release processes, infrastructure-as-code, source control and administration of Azure DevOps, environment configuration, secrets management, working with the Solution and Technical Architects
• leading the technical response to major incidents, diagnosing complex failures, directing recovery and ensuring root causes are resolved to prevent recurrence
• engineering and continuously improving automation across build, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, release, deployment and operational processes
• leading the evaluation and review of IaaS and PaaS approaches, tools and standards, and providing expert advice on them
• providing technical expertise and input into capital work, including technical scope, estimates, design and risk
• designing, coding, testing and documenting Azure-based software and services, and leading functional, performance and usability testing with the QA team
• reviewing technical specifications from suppliers and IT partners, and peer reviewing work from the team, contractors and third parties
• ensuring all Azure development meets company security standards, and working with the security and networking teams to define the cloud security perimeter and provide a 'zero touch' experience for DevOps and engineering colleagues
• planning and undertaking software and service upgrades under the standard Change Control process
• building and directing integrations for telemetry ingestion from IoT and OT devices, enabling Big Data workloads to be consumed by Data Engineering while ensuring regulatory compliance
• mentoring and developing the technical capability of the Cloud Engineering team, supporting the Cloud Engineering Team Leader.

The role may require participation in an out-of-hours support rota.

What you'll need 

Due to the range of work, we are looking for someone with extensive, hands-on experience of engineering, automating and running secure, resilient Azure-based services in a business-critical environment, spanning cloud, legacy, operational and OT/IoT estates.

You will:

• have extensive specialist, hands-on experience of designing, implementing and running CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep, Terraform etc) with strong automation and scripting skills in Python, PowerShell and Bash
• have proven experience of leading the standardisation of Azure DevOps, GitHub and source-control practice (GitHubFlow and GitVersioning)
• have extensive hands-on expertise across Azure infrastructure (IaaS/PaaS), including virtual machines and services such as Function Apps, Logic Apps and App Services
• have strong network engineering expertise across on-premises and cloud environments, including hub-and-spoke design, S2S VPN and ExpressRoute
• have proven experience of containerised application development (Docker, Kubernetes, ACR) and cloud-native .NET and Python development
• have practical expertise in secret management, RBAC and PIM, security tokens, OAuth, certificates and ISO 27001, within a Zero-Trust operating model
• have experience of data and integration technologies, including Azure IoT Hub, Apache Spark, Azure Data Explorer, Azure Synapse, Fabric, Microsoft SQL Server, Cosmos and Redis
• have extensive hands-on experience of observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Metrics, Azure Alerting and Log Analytics
• have a strong understanding of testing techniques for functional and non-functional testing of Azure-based software and services
• demonstrate technical leadership through design guidance, estimation, coaching, peer review and constructive challenge, without the need for line-management responsibility
• have excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to people at all levels and the authority to advise Heads of Department
• be able to work independently with a high degree of autonomy, making sound decisions at the right time in a time-pressured environment
• be educated to degree level in software engineering or equivalent.

What you'll receive

• A combined pension contribution of up to 20%.
• Career progression and professional development opportunities.
• 25 days' holiday rising to 28 with length of service.
• The opportunity to sell up to five days of holiday every year.
• The opportunity to buy up to ten days of holiday each year (subject to conditions).
• A healthcare package that allows you to claim back healthcare costs.
• Life assurance of up to eight times your salary.
• The opportunity to lease a new electric car through salary sacrifice (subject to conditions).
• Cashback and discounts from more than 3,000 retailers.
• One paid volunteering day each year.
• Enhanced family leave and pay arrangements.
• Access to an interactive health and wellbeing platform.
• Support from trained mental health first aiders.
• A £1,000 referral fee if you recommend someone who is successfully recruited by us. 

Who we are

YTL UK is part of the international YTL Group based in Kuala Lumpur. The UK companies include:

• Wessex Water – one of the top-performing water and sewerage companies in England and Wales, serving 2.9 million people across the South West
• YTL Developments – a major UK developer currently redeveloping a 450-acre former airfield into an award-winning, exciting mix of houses, apartments, schools, commercial space, restaurants and hotels, to make a truly sustainable new community
• YTL Construction UK – a top 20 UK contractor providing fully integrated services to infrastructure, residential, commercial, industry, energy and environmental sectors
• YTL Live – the development and operation of an entertainment complex that includes a 20,000 capacity arena, conferencing and exhibition space
• plus a number of other retail, environmental and specialist businesses.

Our people tell us that YTL UK is a great place to work, which is why so many of them stay with us! You will have a unique opportunity to develop and progress your career within such a diverse group.

We are passionate about diversity and inclusion – with that in mind, all applicants are welcome. We are delighted to have signed the Armed Forces Covenant and are a Disability Confident Employer.

If you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process, please inform a member of our Recruitment team.