Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer

Salary: £60,000 - 65,000 per year

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Systems Administration, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering or a similar role.
• Significant hands-on experience operating production-grade infrastructure.
• Strong Linux administration experience.
• Practical experience across both Linux and Microsoft server estates.
• Proven experience managing infrastructure supporting business-critical applications.
• Experience taking ownership of complex technical problems with limited supervision.
• Proven ability to investigate unfamiliar systems and determine appropriate solutions.
• Experience improving infrastructure reliability, automation, security or operational efficiency.
• Previous experience operating in a senior or highly autonomous engineering role.
• Strong professional experience administering Linux server environments in production.
• Strong understanding of Linux system administration, including users and permissions, system services, package management, networking, storage and filesystems, scheduled tasks, logging, performance management and troubleshooting.
• Experience provisioning and configuring servers and virtual machines from initial deployment through to production readiness.
• Strong understanding of production infrastructure reliability, availability and operational support.
• Experience with system patching, upgrades and lifecycle management.
• Experience diagnosing complex infrastructure issues independently.
• Strong experience with system, application and security monitoring.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring and alerting for new infrastructure and applications.
• Ability to identify meaningful service health indicators and create appropriate alerts.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure security, access control, patch management, vulnerability remediation, system hardening, logging, auditing and certificate management.
• Experience responding to production incidents and security-related infrastructure issues.
• Strong understanding of backup, recovery and disaster recovery principles.
• Experience documenting and testing disaster recovery procedures.
• Strong working knowledge of Ansible.
• Experience using automation to manage server configuration, application deployment, package installation, security configuration, environment setup and recurring operational tasks.
• Ability to design reusable, maintainable and well-documented automation.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure automation and configuration management principles.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code concepts.
• Strong experience with Docker and containerised workloads.
• Experience with CRI-O, containerd or comparable container runtimes.
• Practical experience administering Kubernetes clusters in production or business-critical environments.
• Strong understanding of deployments, pods, services, ingress, persistent storage, secrets, configuration, resource allocation, cluster networking, availability, monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Ability to independently deploy, troubleshoot and maintain applications within Kubernetes.
• Experience supporting highly available containerised environments.
• Strong experience administering MySQL environments.
• Experience managing Galera Cluster or comparable highly available MySQL architectures.
• Good understanding of replication, backup and restore, performance, monitoring, database troubleshooting, permissions and access, upgrades, clustering, high availability, failover and disaster recovery.
• Ability to investigate and resolve database performance and availability issues.
• Experience administering Microsoft SQL Server / MSSQL environments.
• Good understanding of database backup and recovery, permissions, maintenance, monitoring, performance, troubleshooting, availability and resilience.
• Strong experience administering Microsoft Windows Server environments.
• Experience installing, configuring and maintaining Windows-based servers and applications.
• Experience with system monitoring, patching, security and operational support.
• Strong understanding of Windows Server permissions, services and network configuration.
• Ability to troubleshoot Windows infrastructure and application issues independently.
• Experience supporting business-critical Microsoft workloads.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing, maintaining and troubleshooting automated deployment pipelines.
• Understanding of build, test and production deployment processes.
• Strong working knowledge of Git and modern source control workflows.
• Experience supporting software developers with infrastructure and deployment requirements.
• Ability to improve deployment reliability through automation and standardisation.
• Experience supporting multiple development, staging and production environments.
• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP / HTTPS, firewalls, VPNs, load balancing, reverse proxies and TLS / SSL certificates.
• Experience administering web servers such as Nginx and Apache.
• Understanding of highly available, multi-server environments.
• Ability to troubleshoot infrastructure issues across operating system, networking, database and application layers.
• Experience working alongside external infrastructure or managed service providers.
• Strong problem-solving and diagnostic capability.
• Comfortable being given an outcome or problem rather than a predefined technical solution.
• Able to independently investigate, evaluate options and implement appropriate solutions.
• Strong ownership mentality and willingness to take responsibility for systems through their full lifecycle.
• Proactive approach to identifying operational risks before they become incidents.
• Calm and methodical approach to production incidents and high-pressure situations.
• Strong attention to detail.
• Good communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to explain infrastructure risks and recommendations in practical business terms.
• Previous experience supporting SAP environments.
• Experience working with infrastructure hosting or supporting SAP application and database workloads.
• Experience with Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code tooling.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with centralised logging and observability platforms.
• Experience with vulnerability management and security tooling.
• Experience administering Redis or similar caching technologies.
• Experience with highly available ecommerce or customer-facing infrastructure.
• Experience supporting infrastructure across multiple physical locations or datacentres.
• Experience working in organisations subject to formal audit, governance or listed-company control requirements.
• Familiarity with broader Microsoft infrastructure and enterprise systems.

Responsibilities:

• We will administer, maintain and improve Linux and Microsoft server environments.
• We will provision and configure new virtual machines, servers, services and supporting infrastructure.
• We will deploy and configure applications and infrastructure components.
• We will monitor the health, performance, availability and security of production and internal systems.
• We will investigate and resolve infrastructure incidents, performance issues and system failures.
• We will design and implement appropriate monitoring, alerting and logging for new and existing systems.
• We will manage and improve configuration automation using Ansible.
• We will support and administer containerised environments using Docker, CRI-O and Kubernetes.
• We will manage Kubernetes clusters, workloads, services and associated infrastructure.
• We will administer and provide operational support for MySQL, Galera Cluster and Microsoft SQL Server environments.
• We will build, maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines.
• We will support software deployment and release processes in collaboration with the Development Team.
• We will maintain system patching, upgrades, security configuration and vulnerability remediation.
• We will manage backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes.
• We will improve infrastructure resilience and reduce key-person dependencies through documentation and cross-training.
• We will review existing infrastructure and recommend improvements where systems can be made more reliable, secure, maintainable or efficient.
• We will support infrastructure-related security incidents and remediation activities.
• We will maintain clear technical documentation covering systems, infrastructure, recovery procedures and operational processes.
• We will work with third-party infrastructure and technology partners where specialist support is required.
• We will support the broader IT function where infrastructure, systems or operational responsibilities overlap.

Technologies:

• Ansible
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Docker
• Git
• HTTP
• Support
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Load Balancing
• MySQL
• Network
• Nginx
• Redis
• SAP
• SQL
• Security
• TCP/IP
• Terraform
• Web
• Windows

More:

We are seeking a Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer to support our TW Group infrastructure estate across Linux and Microsoft environments. This is a hands-on senior role based with 1 or 2 days a week expected at our Head Office in Blackburn, with a salary of £60k-£65k. You will work closely with our Software Development Team, IT Operations and selected third-party technology partners to support business-critical infrastructure, development environments, databases, container platforms and deployment pipelines. We offer a role focused on ownership, automation, monitoring, resilience, documentation and disaster recovery improvement across our wider IT estate.

last updated 37 week of 2026