Full job description

Senior DevOps Engineer

Reporting to: Head of Software Excellence

Location: UK

Role Objectives

• Drive DevOps Excellence by fostering, teaching, and embedding DevOps best practices across Hays projects, ensuring teams adopt consistent engineering, automation, deployment, and operational standards.
• Provide Technical Leadership & Mentorship by acting as a senior coach and trusted advisor to DevOps Engineers, supporting capability development through hands-on guidance, reviews, knowledge sharing, and best-practice frameworks.
• Ensure SDLC Governance & Compliance by auditing projects against Hays SDLC standards, driving adherence to quality gates, security controls, documentation requirements, traceability standards, and audit-ready delivery practices.
• Own Global DevOps Tooling & Standards by designing, implementing, and maintaining shared platforms, CI/CD frameworks, automation capabilities, reusable templates, and engineering patterns that enable scalable and efficient software delivery.
• Champion Continuous Improvement by identifying delivery bottlenecks, promoting automation, improving engineering maturity, and driving the adoption of modern Agile and DevOps ways of working across the organisation.
• Build Strategic Cross-Functional Partnerships by collaborating closely with Solution Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, QA & Testing, Product, and Delivery teams to align engineering practices, non-functional requirements, and operational readiness.
• Promote Engineering Excellence at Scale by establishing and maintaining reusable best practices, standards, and governance frameworks that improve consistency, quality, security, reliability, and delivery performance across all projects.
• Act as a Trusted Engineering Advisor by influencing technical decision-making, communicating risks and recommendations clearly, and ensuring engineering outcomes align with Hays' strategic objectives and SDLC principles.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Skills

• Senior-level hands-on DevOps engineering experience in complex enterprise environments, ideally across globally distributed delivery teams.
• Strong practical understanding of modern SDLC governance, DevOps ways of working, agile delivery, quality gates, and audit-ready software delivery practices.
• Proven experience designing, improving, and operating CI/CD pipelines for multiple technology stacks and deployment models.
• Experience creating reusable engineering templates, standards, and playbooks that are adopted by multiple teams rather than one isolated project.
• Strong working knowledge of Azure DevOps and/or GitHub, Git-based source control, pull request workflows, build and release pipelines, pipeline as code, and secure branching practices.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code and automation approaches, for example Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent.
• Good understanding of cloud-native delivery patterns across Azure and/or AWS, including container images, container registries, Kubernetes or comparable container services, environment promotion, network and security considerations, and operational monitoring.
• Experience integrating quality and security checks into pipelines, including unit tests, integration tests, automated regression tests, static code analysis, dependency scanning, secret scanning, and deployment approvals.

Preferred Qualifications and Certifications

• Degree in computer science, software engineering, information technology, or equivalent practical experience.
• Microsoft Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub, Azure DevOps, or security-related certifications are advantageous.
• Experience working in agile delivery teams
• Experience working with audit-conscious enterprise technology environments
• Experience supporting large-scale transformation, SDLC standardisation, DevOps adoption, or platform/tooling consolidation initiatives
• Indicative experience: 5-8 years in DevOps, platform engineering, software engineering, release engineering, or related roles, with senior ownership and mentoring responsibilities.

·        Cloud Platforms: AWS (VPC, EC2, IAM, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, Route 53, Secrets Manager, SSM Parameter Store)

·        Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), Amazon ECS Fargate, Helm

·        Kubernetes Ecosystem: Karpenter, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), EKS Pod Identity, AWS Load Balancer Controller, cert-manager, ExternalDNS

·        CI/CD & GitOps: Harness, CircleCI, JetBrains TeamCity, ArgoCD

·        Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation

·        Databases: PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache (Redis)

·        Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace, CloudWatch

·        Security & Code Quality: SonarQube, Veracode, Wiz

·        Artefact Management: JFrog Artifactory, Amazon ECR

·        Programming & Scripting: Python, Bash, Linux

·        Core Competencies: Cloud Architecture, Disaster Recovery, Platform Engineering, Incident Management, Cost Optimisation, DevSecOps