About the Role
We're partnering with a leading global Financial Services organisation to recruit an experienced Senior DevOps / Infrastructure Development Engineer for an initial 6-month contract.
This is a hands-on engineering role within a high-performing DevOps and Platform Engineering team, focused on developing software, automation and tooling that enables the organisation to build, test, deploy and operate infrastructure at scale.
The successful candidate will combine strong software development skills with infrastructure and Linux expertise. You will spend significant time writing production-quality code, developing automation, building CI/CD pipelines, integrating APIs and platforms, and creating automated testing frameworks.
This is not a traditional infrastructure support role. We're looking for an engineer who approaches infrastructure as software and is comfortable applying modern software engineering principles to enterprise infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Software Development & Automation
- Design, develop and maintain production-quality Python applications, automation and infrastructure tooling.
- Build reusable frameworks and libraries for infrastructure provisioning, configuration, validation and deployment.
- Develop APIs and integrations between internal platforms, vendor technologies and enterprise services.
- Write clean, modular, maintainable and testable code following modern software engineering practices.
- Refactor and improve existing automation to increase reliability, scalability and maintainability.
- Develop tooling that removes manual operational processes and enables self-service infrastructure.
- Implement robust error handling, logging, monitoring and exception management within automation.
- Work with Git-based development workflows, branching strategies, pull requests and peer code reviews.
DevOps & CI/CD
- Design, develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure, applications, automation and platform services.
- Automate the complete software delivery lifecycle from code commit through build, test, validation and deployment.
- Implement automated unit, integration, regression and infrastructure testing.
- Develop pipeline quality gates to prevent defective or insecure code from reaching production.
- Integrate security, vulnerability and compliance checks into CI/CD workflows.
- Automate release processes and deployment validation.
- Improve pipeline performance, reliability and developer experience.
- Establish repeatable deployment patterns across development, test, pre-production and production environments.
Infrastructure as Code
- Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using technologies such as Ansible, SaltStack or equivalent.
- Treat infrastructure configuration as version-controlled code.
- Build automated workflows for provisioning, configuration management and infrastructure lifecycle management.
- Develop reusable automation modules, roles and components.
- Implement automated infrastructure validation and configuration testing.
- Support the evolution towards fully automated, repeatable and self-service infrastructure delivery.
Testing & Quality Engineering
- Develop automated testing strategies for infrastructure code, applications and platform integrations.
- Write unit and integration tests for Python-based automation.
- Develop test harnesses and frameworks for validating infrastructure changes.
- Create automated pre-production validation processes.
- Ensure code changes are production-ready before release.
Platform & Systems Integration
- Develop software integrations across Linux, infrastructure platforms, APIs and enterprise services.
- Integrate third‑party and internally developed technologies into the organisation's DevOps toolchain.
- Build automation around infrastructure APIs and management platforms.
- Troubleshoot complex integration issues spanning applications, operating systems, networks and infrastructure platforms.
Security Engineering
- Develop automated solutions for security vulnerability remediation across infrastructure and software platforms.
- Integrate security scanning and vulnerability detection into CI/CD pipelines.
- Implement secure coding practices across Python and infrastructure automation.
- Automate security configuration and infrastructure hardening.
DevOps Engineering & Continuous Improvement
- Work closely with Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Security and Operations teams.
- Participate in technical design, architecture and code reviews.
- Contribute to DevOps engineering standards, development patterns and reusable tooling.
- Identify bottlenecks in development and deployment processes and automate them.
- Contribute to the continuous evolution of the organisation's DevOps platform.
Required Experience
Software Development
- Strong Python development experience in a professional engineering environment.
- Demonstrable experience developing production-quality automation, tooling or applications.
- Strong understanding of object‑oriented programming, modular design and software engineering principles.
- Experience writing automated tests, including unit and integration testing.
- Strong experience with Git, source control and collaborative software development workflows.
- Experience with APIs, REST services and system integrations.
- Strong debugging and problem‑solving skills.
DevOps
- Strong commercial experience in DevOps engineering.
- Extensive experience designing and developing CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong understanding of continuous integration, continuous delivery and automated deployment.
- Experience implementing automated testing within CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code and configuration management.
- Understanding of software release management and deployment strategies.
- Experience automating infrastructure and application delivery.
- Strong Linux engineering experience, ideally across large-scale enterprise environments.
- Good understanding of networking, operating systems, infrastructure services and distributed systems.
- Experience troubleshooting complex issues across code, operating systems, infrastructure and automation.
- Experience supporting highly available and business‑critical production environments.
- Experience working with Agile / Scrum or similar engineering methodologies.
- Strong understanding of SDLC and modern software development practices.
- Experience with peer code reviews and collaborative development.
- Ability to produce maintainable, well‑documented and production‑ready code.
- Strong understanding of development, testing and production lifecycle management.
- Ansible, SaltStack or equivalent configuration management technologies.
- Experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar CI/CD platforms.
- Experience with Docker and containerised applications.
- VMware / virtualisation technologies.
- Experience developing against infrastructure and cloud APIs.
- Experience with automated security and vulnerability scanning.
- Experience with observability, monitoring, logging and alerting platforms.
- Experience working within Financial Services or other highly regulated environments.
- Experience with public or private cloud platforms.