DEVOPS ENGINEER

Lightning Fibre is recruiting a DevOps Engineer to join the Network Development team in Polegate. The salary for this role will depend on your experience.
Lightning Fibre was established in 2018. We are a leading local alternative network provider of full fibre broadband in East Sussex. We are headquartered in Polegate and have an existing broadband network in East Sussex. Our broadband network can supply our standard installed customers with anything up to 10 Gigabits in both download and uploads.
We are a community-oriented network operator, whose aim is to significantly upgrade our region’s broadband infrastructure, providing local jobs and keeping local money in the areas we serve. We are a vital enabler to grow our digital local economy, thereby creating further quality jobs. Lightning Fibre has bold plans for growth and development.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Proven experience in a DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Systems Administration role
• Strong experience with FreeBSD and Debian Linux
• Solid understanding of virtualisation and private cloud platforms (e.g. Proxmore, VMware)
• Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, or Chef)
• Experience with monitoring and logging stacks (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, or equivalents)
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Perl, Python, or similar)
• Strong troubleshooting skills across systems, networks, and applications
• Understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls)
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience
• Experience integrating bespoke or legacy applications into automated workflows
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
• Knowledge of secure system design and hardening practices
• FreeRadius administration or integration experience
• Understanding of TR-069 / TR-181 / TR-369 for CPE device management
• Experience with Jira/Confluence automation
• Exposure to private AI/ML tooling for anomaly detection or data analysis at scale
  Please submit your CV together with a short covering letter or message which should outline what you will bring to this role.
  Job Type: Full-time
  Pay: Up to £60,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Company pension
• Cycle to work scheme
• Employee discount
• Enhanced maternity leave
• Enhanced paternity leave
• Health & wellbeing programme
• Life insurance
• Referral programme
• Sick pay

Ability to commute/relocate:

• Polegate BN26: reliably commute or plan to relocate before starting work (required)

Work authorisation:

• United Kingdom (required)

Work Location: In perso

THE ROLE PRIMARY PURPOSE:

The DevOps engineer will ensure that Lightning Fibre’s internal systems, applications, and monitoring platforms run reliably, securely, and efficiently. The role focuses on managing and automating our FreeBSD and Linux virtual machines, all hosted on a private cloud infrastructure.
A key responsibility is maintaining and enhancing the logging, monitoring and alerting platforms that collect status and performance data from both our core network and customer connections. This enables the business to proactively identify and respond to issues, while giving Customer/Tech Support, Network and delivery teams the information they need.
This role also drives automation and operational visibility across the company, from deployments to and status pages to Jira/Confluence workflow automation, and future use of private AI/ML models that help spot anomalies and patterns in large volumes of operational data.
Ultimately this role helps us deliver a more resilient network and a smoother customer experience by ensuring that our systems and processes scale with the company’s growth.

KEY TASK AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Maintain and optimise our FreeBSD and Debian/Ubuntu virtual machines
• Own our monitoring and observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, etc.)
• Implement, refine, and support CI/CD pipelines for bespoke internal applications
• Develop infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Ansible) to improve repeatability and reduce manual intervention
• Automate system administration tasks, deployments, and updates
• Troubleshoot production issues and participate in on-call rotation
• Work with development and project teams to design and implement operational requirements from the ground up
• Ensure system security patching, and compliance with internal policies