DevOps Laravel Engineer
Department: IT
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: UK
Reporting To: Ed Haynes
Compensation: £65,000 - £75,000 / year
Description
DeterTech's purpose is giving greater peace of mind to people and communities, every day. The systems and software behind our products need to be as reliable and secure as the physical security solutions we deliver. This role exists to build and maintain the infrastructure, automation and deployment pipelines that keep our Laravel-based applications running smoothly, securely and at scale.
The DevOps Laravel Engineer will work within the IT function, part of Group Operations, partnering closely with our development team to bring strong DevOps practice to the applications that support DeterTech's customers and colleagues across the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
This role will take day-to-day operational ownership of our AWS cloud environment under the technical direction and architectural governance of the Lead Full Stack Developer. Working closely alongside the Lead Developer and existing infrastructure specialists, you will share and progressively take on full operational ownership of our cloud footprint—establishing robust auto-scaling, high-availability, and modern infrastructure-as-code practices. You will bridge the gap between cloud infrastructure and application engineering—ensuring event queues, databases, and background workers scale effortlessly during real-time alarm surges, while embedding automated deployment pipelines that help our developers ship quality code safely, predictably, and with full architectural sign-off.
Key Responsibilities
1. Infrastructure and environments
- Build, maintain and continuously improve the cloud infrastructure that hosts DeterTech's Laravel applications, using infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Manage development, staging and production environments so releases are consistent, predictable and easy to roll back if needed.
- Own the configuration and performance of web servers, databases and caching layers supporting our applications.
- Architect, configure, and maintain our core AWS cloud footprint (specifically EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM, and VPC networking, alongside ECS/containers) in direct consultation with the Lead Developer, adhering to established system design standards, high availability, and disaster recovery requirements.
- Collaborate alongside existing infrastructure specialists to capture, map, and record infrastructure knowledge as operational ownership is progressively consolidated in-house, maintaining clear architecture diagrams and operational runbooks.
- Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using technologies such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation, ensuring all cloud infrastructure modifications are submitted via pull requests, version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and signed off prior to execution.
- Fine-tune and scale background queues and caching layers to guarantee low latency or monitoring lag during high-volume alarm spikes.
2. CI/CD and automation
- Design, build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for Laravel applications, automating testing, build and deployment.
- Reduce manual, repetitive work through automation, so the development team can ship changes quickly and safely.
- Support version control workflows and branching strategies that keep releases clean and traceable.
- Architect, configure, and maintain our core AWS cloud footprint (specifically EC2, ECS/containers, RDS, and Lambda) in direct consultation with the Lead Developer, adhering to established system design standards, high availability, and disaster recovery requirements.
- Maintain clear, documented architecture diagrams, operational runbooks, and internal cloud governance in partnership with the Lead Developer.
- Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using technologies such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation, ensuring all cloud infrastructure modifications are submitted via pull requests, version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and signed off prior to execution.
- Fine-tune and scale background queues and caching layers to guarantee low latency or monitoring lag during high-volume alarm spikes.
3. Monitoring, reliability and security
- Implement monitoring, logging and alerting so issues are caught and resolved before they affect customers or colleagues.
- Own backup, disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements for the applications you support.
- Participate as an escalation point for production incidents alongside our 24/7 out-of-hours support partner, following clear triage and communication processes.
- Deploy centralised observability and alerting systems (e.g. Grafana, or Sentry etc) to monitor API response times, queue depths, memory thresholds, and database connection pooling in real time, escalating critical anomalies to the Lead Developer.
- Enforce robust cloud security policies, least-privilege IAM roles, security groups, SSL/TLS certificates, and secure secrets management (e.g. AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault), avoiding plain-text credentials in application code.
- Ensure infrastructure and release processes comply with ISO 27001, GDPR, and security alarm industry regulatory standards.
- Provide our external 24/7 out-of-hours support partner with up-to-date operational runbooks, health check procedures, and clear escalation workflows in agreement with the Lead Developer.
4. Collaboration and continuous improvement
- Work closely with the development team to embed DevOps thinking into how Laravel applications are designed, built and released.
- Share knowledge and document processes clearly, so the wider IT and development teams can work confidently with the systems you build.
- Keep up to date with developments in the Laravel and DevOps ecosystem, bringing new tools and approaches to the team where they add real value.
- Conduct cost-optimisation reviews across AWS services, presenting rightsizing and architectural recommendations to the Lead Developer and IT leadership for approval.
- Facilitate blameless post-incident reviews alongside the Lead Developer following infrastructure or deployment issues to prevent recurring outages.
Skills, Knowledge & Expertise
- Proven experience in a DevOps or infrastructure engineering role supporting PHP/Laravel applications in production.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (for example GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins) and infrastructure-as-code (for example Terraform or Ansible).
- Strong Linux administration skills and experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
- Practical knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and, ideally, orchestration (Kubernetes or similar).
- Experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and caching technologies (Redis).
- A security-conscious mindset, comfortable applying best practice around access control, secrets management and vulnerability management.
- Clear communicator, comfortable working closely with developers and explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Commercial background configuring and managing production AWS cloud environments, specifically focused on EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM, and VPC (or comparable cloud equivalents).
- Practical understanding of Laravel internals from an infrastructure perspective (Artisan commands, queue workers, job processing, caching strategies, and Laravel Horizon).
- Comfortable collaborating alongside external or partner technical specialists to share operational coverage and progressively absorb platform ownership.
- Strong technical documentation skills, able to record, map, and consolidate infrastructure architecture and operational runbooks as knowledge transitions in-house.
- Demonstrated experience implementing Terraform or CloudFormation to manage infrastructure-as-code in a multi-environment setting (Dev, Staging, Production).
- Hands-on experience securing cloud workloads, applying principle of least privilege, secrets management, and network access controls.
- Comfortable collaborating under the technical governance of a Lead Developer, actively seeking code and architectural reviews for infrastructure changes.
Desirable
- Familiarity with Laravel-specific tooling
- Experience working in a regulated or security-focused industry.
- Exposure to observability tooling (for example Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or Datadog).
- Experience supporting applications used across multiple countries or time zones.
- AWS Certifications (e.g. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Solutions Architect, or DevOps Engineer).
- Familiarity with containerised deployments using Docker and AWS ECS.
- Experience handling high-throughput, real-time message queues or streaming architectures (such as SQS, RabbitMQ, or MQTT for IoT devices).
- Experience collaborating with an external 24/7 managed service or out-of-hours monitoring partner.