Lead Dev Ops Engineer
12 days ago
Ipswich
The work you will be doing The Lead Dev Ops Engineer is accountable for the Azure platform, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and the delivery system (CI/CD standards, templates and controls) that enables Birketts squads to deliver to Azure quickly, safely and consistently. You will establish and maintain the “one right way” of working for Azure environments: guardrails, governance, repeatability and operational readiness. You will work closely with Product development leadership, security and infrastructure stakeholders to ensure standards are adopted through tooling (Azure Policy and Azure DevOps), not documentation alone. Platform ownership, governance and control • Own subscription and landing zone hygiene, including remediation of legacy resources outside the agreed model, • Define and enforce platform governance standards: naming conventions, tagging schema, Azure Policy baseline and controlled exception handling, • Define and maintain identity and access patterns (RBAC and, where applicable, PIM) and platform security guardrails in collaboration with security and relevant stakeholders, • Establish and maintain Terraform as the authoritative mechanism for platform and environment provisioning and change control, • Design and maintain reusable IaC modules/patterns; implement safe change practices (review, validation, controlled applies), • Define and evolve delivery system standards in partnership with the Product Development Team Leader, and enforce them through Azure DevOps templates, policies and required checks, • Own and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD standards, pipeline templates, approvals/gates, and environment promotion model, • Provide “golden path” templates and patterns for application-level and data-level delivery (including Azure resources) so squads can deliver without bespoke pipeline design per product, • Embed automated quality controls and security scanning into pipelines (e.g., SAST/SCA) and define secure secret-handling patterns aligned to Birketts expectations, • Provide and evolve platform observability foundations: monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and alerting (using the agreed toolset), • Define and improve incident response and operational readiness expectations (runbooks, escalation paths, recovery/rollback patterns, environment health checks), • Maintain a visible platform backlog and roadmap (stabilisation, governance, standardisation, developer experience), • Coach squads in using the delivery system effectively (templates, PR discipline, gated releases, environment promotion), • Support capability building for internal engineers (including infrastructure engineers where willing) using pairing and staged responsibility (“gated autonomy”), • Create and maintain platform documentation: handbook, onboarding guides, decision records and runbooks to reduce key-person dependency What we are looking for • A candidate who has owned or led DevOps / platform engineering capability in Azure and can balance delivery speed with governance and risk control, • Enjoys creating standards and guardrails that enable teams rather than slow them down, • Can operate effectively in an environment with mixed maturity, coaching teams while maintaining safe operational practices Essential Knowledge & Experience • Proven, hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating Azure infrastructure (subscriptions, governance, identity/access, and core platform services), • Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience, ideally Terraform (module/pattern design, environment patterns, safe change practices), • Strong CI/CD engineering experience, ideally Azure DevOps (templating, approvals/gates, environment promotion strategies, required checks), • Working understanding of security practices in cloud delivery (least privilege/IAM, secrets handling, secure pipeline patterns), • Practical understanding of observability and operational readiness (logs/metrics/tracing concepts; dashboards/alerts; runbooks), • Strong communication skills and ability to explain standards/guardrails in business-impact terms Hybrid Working Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. This role attracts a split of 60% office days and 40% working from home days per week. Benefits As a Birkett colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits: • 25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays, • Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service, • Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed), • Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee), • Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme, • Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share), • Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance, • Paid CSR Day, • Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave, • Subsidised gym membership, • Electric car scheme, • Dress for your Day Policy