DevOps Engineer

Location: Bristol, UK

About the role

Our DevOps team integrates developers and operations teams to improve collaboration and productivity, by automating infrastructure, workflows and continuously measuring application performance.  We are searching for mid or senior applicants to work within a multi-functional engineering team in a DevOps environment. 

This is an opportunity to collaborate in a small cross-functional team to design, implement and run our automated platform for delivery and production hosting. You will drive and maintain our development, staging, and production infrastructure (using tools like Terraform, GoCD, Kubernetes, and Ansible) to automate common everyday infrastructure tasks. These days our preferred languages for developing the automations are Java, Go, and a bit of bash scripting. You will be part of an on-call rota with the team to ensure production systems stay running at all times and deliver great service to our customers.

About the Team

Our products and services are designed, built and cared for by our engineering teams in Bristol. Each team owns a slice of the product portfolio in close collaboration with product managers. We believe in letting teams self-organise and self-determine by supporting them with design and project expertise when needed.

We use Java, Go, PHP, JS, TypeScript and SQL in a diverse suite of applications. Our service oriented architecture processes thousands of transactions an hour while maintaining high-availability and reliability. Our uniform deployment platform (Kubernetes on AWS supported by our global Infrastructure team) means that everyone gets hands-on experience with the full lifecycle of each product.

 

Your Day-to-Day:

• Collaborate with Software Engineers to improve reliability and performance in their subsystems.
• Partner with System Administrators in automating toil and eliminating alerts.
• Provide “follow-the-sun” coverage with UK/US co-workers to ensure production availability on an as needed basis.
• Proactively diagnose problems identified in production and recommend solutions.
• Support development environments to help us achieve our delivery and quality goals.
• Research and evaluate technologies, tools and services to influence buy-vs-build decisions.
• Develop expertise in diverse technical and business domains.
• Expand your knowledge of programming languages and technical stacks.

About You:

Technology Skills

• Industry experience writing well-tested code in one of our platform languages (Java, Go, Python, Ruby or similar).
• Integration experience with HTTP APIs (e.g. REST).
• Good understanding of relational databases and SQL.
• Experience using modern configuration management tools (such as Ansible, Chef or similar).
• Experience working with Terraform.
• Experience both using and maintaining CI / CD tools (such as GoCD, Jenkins or similar).
• Linux command line, basic administration and shell scripting.
• Experience tracking down bugs in a production environment.
• Experience using, developing with and maintaining cloud hosting services (ideally AWS EC2 and RDS)

Professional Skills

• Motivated by continual improvement, with a keen interest in learning new technologies.
• Ability to work with a variety of languages and technologies day-to-day.
• Assess the relative merits of different languages and technologies according to requirements and required outcomes.
• Good verbal and written communication skills; fluent in English.

• Team player – enjoys collaboration and helping others, as well as working autonomously to  deliver to deadlines, with quality.
• Work calmly under pressure to resolve production issues.
• Proactively communicate with colleagues and stakeholders.
• Quality focused and detail oriented.
• Eligible to work in the UK without visa sponsorship from Brightpearl.

It would be great if you also have:

• Background in high scale systems development.
• Experience with queuing technologies (e.g. RabbitMQ).
• ELK / monitoring experience.
• Broad knowledge of various AWS services.
• An understanding of the core kubernetes primitives.
• Familiar maintaining & supporting varied production environments.
• Experience instrumenting services for performance and reliability monitoring.