Middlesbrough - Hybrid
Do you want to help shape software that affects thousands of lives? Who are we? We are ranked as the UK’s #1 construction specific software player and our mission is simple; to provide market leading end-to-end software solutions to the construction and construction like industries across the entire build life cycle. If you are looking to build an exceptional career with an award-winning company you’ve come to the right place. Our teams are based in the UK, Europe, US, and India, working on products that are used on a global scale. We have a clear and defined road map to deliver over the next 3 years, which is centred around a large-scale digital transformation as well as continuing our growth and expansion. We embrace diversity and equality and want our employees to be comfortable bringing their whole selves to work. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, skills and views. Creating a culture of Equality isn’t just the right thing to do, it improves every aspect of our business.
Purpose
The Senior DevOps Engineer is a senior member of the Engineering function, responsible for leading the infrastructure, tooling, and practices that enable Causeway’s product and platform engineering teams to build, ship, and operate software reliably and at pace. The role sits at the intersection of software engineering and infrastructure. The Senior DevOps Engineer partners directly with product and platform teams to design and own the CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and operational standards that underpin Causeway’s SaaS products. This is a hands‑on engineering role, with the expectation to build systems as code, influence architectural decisions, establish engineering standards, and treat infrastructure with the same rigour applied to software. The Senior DevOps Engineer provides technical leadership across the DevOps discipline, supporting and mentoring other engineers while driving improvements in platform reliability, developer experience, security, and cost efficiency.
Key Responsibilities
Platform & Infrastructure Engineering
- Lead the design, build, and maintenance of cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC), owning Terraform modules, configuration management, and environment consistency across development, staging, and production.
- Manage and evolve the Kubernetes-based container platform, including cluster architecture, configuration, workload scheduling, autoscaling, and namespace governance for product and platform services.
- Own the cloud networking, identity, and secrets management configuration that underpins secure, multi-tenant SaaS delivery.
- Contribute to and influence the design of the platform architecture alongside Software Engineers and Architects, ensuring infrastructure decisions align with product scalability, security, and reliability requirements.
- Evaluate and introduce tooling and platform capabilities that improve the speed, safety, and quality of software delivery across engineering teams.
- Identify and address technical debt within the infrastructure and platform estate, establishing clear improvement roadmaps and priorities.
Developer Experience & CI/CD
- Lead the design and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines that allow engineering teams to deliver code to production frequently, safely, and with a high degree of automation, covering build, test, security scanning, and deployment stages.
- Work closely with software engineers to reduce friction in the development lifecycle, shortening feedback loops, improving local environment parity, and making deployment a routine, low-risk activity.
- Define and maintain branching strategies, environment promotion workflows, and release standards in collaboration with delivery leads and engineering teams.
- Develop and maintain internal platform tooling and self-service capabilities that allow product teams to operate their services with autonomy.
- Establish reusable pipeline patterns, templates, and engineering standards that can be adopted consistently across product teams.
- Create and maintain clear technical documentation of infrastructure, pipelines, architectural decisions, and operational runbooks to ensure knowledge is accessible across engineering.
Reliability & Observability
- Lead the design and ownership of the observability stack, including centralised logging, distributed tracing, metrics collection, and alerting, ensuring engineering teams have clear visibility into the health and performance of their services.
- Define and maintain SLOs and SLAs in collaboration with product and engineering teams, and build the tooling needed to measure and report against them.
- Lead incident response for complex infrastructure and platform issues, conducting post-incident reviews and driving systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.
- Proactively identify reliability, scalability, and performance risks across the platform and work with engineering teams to address them before they impact customers.
- Champion a culture of operational excellence across engineering, promoting practices such as chaos engineering, load testing, capacity planning, and runbook-driven incident response.
- Use operational data and service performance metrics to identify trends and prioritise platform improvements.
Security & Cost Governance
- Embed security practices into the engineering lifecycle, including static analysis, dependency scanning, container image hardening, and secrets management, working with the security team to ensure compliance with ISO27001 and other relevant standards.
- Own cloud cost visibility and optimisation, working with engineering teams to right-size workloads, identify waste, and maintain financial accountability for infrastructure spend.
- Ensure that infrastructure and deployment practices meet data protection and compliance requirements, particularly in the context of multi-tenant SaaS delivery.
- Provide technical guidance on infrastructure security, cloud governance, access controls, and risk management.
- Take responsibility for personal development, staying current with advances in cloud-native engineering, DevSecOps, and platform engineering practices.
Technical Leadership & Engineering Standards
- Act as a technical authority for DevOps and platform engineering, setting standards and providing guidance across the Engineering function.
- Mentor and support DevOps Engineers and other technical colleagues, helping to build capability and promote consistent engineering practices.
- Lead technical discussions, architecture reviews, and proof-of-concept activities relating to cloud infrastructure, automation, reliability, and developer tooling.
- Collaborate with engineering leadership to define the DevOps and platform roadmap, ensuring priorities support wider product and business objectives.
- Challenge existing approaches constructively and drive continuous improvement across infrastructure, delivery, security, and operational practices.
- Promote knowledge sharing and collaboration across product, platform, architecture, security, and IT teams.
Essential
Key Skills, Experience and Qualifications
- Significant experience as a DevOps, Platform, or Site Reliability Engineer within a software product company, with a focus on cloud-native infrastructure and developer tooling.
- Proven experience leading the design and delivery of complex DevOps or platform engineering initiatives.
- Strong proficiency with at least one major cloud platform, with AWS preferred, and deep hands‑on experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform or equivalent.
- Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
- Strong experience with Kubernetes for container orchestration, including cluster management, Helm, workload configuration, security, and operational best practices.
- Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or PowerShell, and familiarity with YAML-based configuration.
- Experience building and operating observability stacks, including logging such as ELK, Datadog, or CloudWatch, alongside metrics, tracing, and alerting.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, IAM, secrets management, and security best practices in a SaaS environment.
- Strong engineering fundamentals, with experience working in version‑controlled codebases, participating in code reviews, and treating infrastructure as software.
- Experience defining technical standards, influencing architectural decisions, and driving the adoption of engineering best practices.
- Experience mentoring or supporting the technical development of other engineers.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and work effectively alongside software engineers, architects, security teams, product teams, and senior stakeholders.
Desirable
- Experience with platform engineering concepts and internal developer platform (IDP) tooling such as Backstage or Port.
- Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd for managing inter-service communication.
- Familiarity with GitOps workflows and tools such as ArgoCD or Flux.
- Knowledge of ISO27001 and experience embedding security controls into engineering pipelines.
- Experience defining and managing SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets.
- Experience in a SaaS company delivering multi‑tenant products at scale.
- Knowledge of the construction, engineering, or field service management industry.
Our Values
We are United. As part of a team, we’re better together.
We are Agile. Be the change, we’re on a journey.
We are Trusted. Do the right thing, we own this.
We are Driven. Get stuck in, we make it happen.
Benefits
- 25 days annual leave + public holidays, increasing with length of service.
- 4% matched pension.
- Income protection and life assurance.
- Access to our award-winning benefits platform.
- We take mental health seriously and have a dedicated EAP available 24/7.
- £100 allowance towards a fitness club.
- Private Medical Insurance.
- Paid study leave + volunteering days.
- Electric Car Scheme.
Like all responsible companies Causeway is aware of the need to recognise the importance of protecting our environment and addressing the climate emergency. Causeway is a carbon neutral company and we offset our calculated carbon footprint. However, we recognise that offsetting is not a permanent solution, so we set environmental objectives to reduce our footprint year-on-year.