Salary: £65,000 - 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, 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:- Administer, maintain and improve Linux and Microsoft server environments.
- Provision and configure new virtual machines, servers, services and supporting infrastructure.
- Deploy and configure applications and infrastructure components.
- Monitor the health, performance, availability and security of production and internal systems.
- Investigate and resolve infrastructure incidents, performance issues and system failures.
- Design and implement monitoring, alerting and logging for new and existing systems.
- Manage and improve configuration automation using Ansible.
- Support and administer containerised environments using Docker, CRI-O and Kubernetes.
- Manage Kubernetes clusters, workloads, services and associated infrastructure.
- Administer and provide operational support for MySQL, Galera Cluster and Microsoft SQL Server environments.
- Build, maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines.
- Support software deployment and release processes in collaboration with the Development Team.
- Maintain system patching, upgrades, security configuration and vulnerability remediation.
- Manage backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes.
- Improve infrastructure resilience and reduce key-person dependencies through documentation and cross-training.
- Review existing infrastructure and recommend improvements where systems can be made more reliable, secure, maintainable or efficient.
- Support infrastructure-related security incidents and remediation activities.
- Maintain clear technical documentation covering systems, infrastructure, recovery procedures and operational processes.
- Work with third-party infrastructure and technology partners where specialist support is required.
- 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 take a hands-on senior role supporting our infrastructure estate across Linux and Microsoft environments. This role is based at our Head Office in Blackburn, with 1 or 2 days a week expected on site, and offers a salary of £60k-£65k. We 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. Alongside day-to-day operations, we are focused on improving automation, monitoring, resilience, documentation and disaster recovery across our wider IT estate.
last updated 38 week of 2026