Description

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Lead DevOps/SRE Engineer with proven DevSecOps skills, to support our transformation and the future growth of the Canada Life UK business. We are on a journey of simplifying our IT estate, removing our legacy systems and delivering innovative solutions through Cloud adoption, AI and expanding our digital services.

As a member of the CLUK Product Engineering team, you will be involved in every stage of the product lifecycle from conception, design, implementation, testing, through to operational support.

With automation at the heart of everything we are doing, you should have a strong hands-on understanding of CI/CD tools, to build secure and reliable applications.

We are looking for Azure experience, though strong experience in any cloud is welcome.

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements and this role offers a hybrid work from home /office model, with the expectation of being onsite for team meets and events. Our office locations include London, Potters Bar, Bristol and Isle of Man.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain applications in Cloud and On-prem, through CI/CD pipelines
• Develop automation scripts for deployment and maintenance of applications
• Monitor system performance and health; identify opportunities for optimization
• Ensure compliance with all security policies and standards
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, identify root causes
• Participate in technical discussions and provide recommendations for improvements
• Document system configurations and processes
• Provide support to other teams as needed
• Provide guidance to less experienced Product Engineering team members to help them learn and develop their own skills

Essential skills needed

• Application support within a Financial Services context (SaaS, PaaS, Cloud, On-Prem hosted applications)
• Relevant experience as a DevOps or SRE Engineer
• Highly proficient in scripting languages like Powershell, Python, Ruby, Bash, and programming languages like C# for automating tasks and creating tools.
• Strong experience in a cloud-based environment e.g. Azure/AWS/GCP and related services
• Experience of cloud engineering within containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Demonstrates following sound engineering practices, especially utilising automation tools, working knowledge of CI/CD pipeline tools such as Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy, Jenkins or GitHub Actions (or similar)
• Possess first class API and interfacing skills
• Used to working within Agile frameworks and can coach others to do the same
• Good understanding of networks, firewalls, load balancers and associated infrastructure needs
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills
• Effective communication and enjoys collaboration with cross-functional teams
• Ability to work both independently and in a team environment

Desirable skills

• Experience of migrating on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and understanding the challenges involved
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices, identity and access management (IAM), and encryption techniques
• Microsoft Azure certifications are a plus

Observability

• Designing, implementing and day-to-day use of logging and monitoring tools to capture data for alerting and issue identification and resolution using DataDog, App Insights or similar tools.
• Designing applications and infrastructure for observability, security, and reliability.

Networking & Security

• Monitor and enhance network performance, ensuring high levels of security and scalability across all cloud environments.
• Enforce security best practices in AKS, including network policies, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and integration with Azure Active Directory

Core Services

• Azure core services such as Azure Storage, including Blob, Azure VMs, Azure LB, Azure ASG, Azure Serverless, Azure DB, Azure Container Instance, Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Software development experience, ideally in .NET stack.
• SQL skills to manage and interact with databases as part of the application deployment process.

CI/CD

• Design, implement, and manage continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy, applied in particular to deployment of containerised applications

Containerisation

• Design and implement containerisation strategies using AKS and associated resources, employing tools such as Terraform and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates
• Develop the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications in AKS, ensuring high availability and performance
• Administer and optimise Azure environments, including hands-on management of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.

Other Features

• Work on the migration of existing infrastructure and applications from on premise data centre to Azure, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition with minimal downtime.
• Collaborate with development and operations teams to automate and streamline operational processes.
• Provide expertise and architectural assistance to other IT staff and project teams, supporting knowledge upskill where needed.
• Work closely with development teams to define deployment strategies, troubleshoot issues, and support application performance
• Create and maintain detailed documentation for architectures; provide training and support to team members