Senior DevOps Engineer, EMEA
Interested in becoming a key technical contributor supporting EMEA operations for a global financial-technology environment? We'd like to hear from you.
Work arrangement: Fully remote
Region: EMEA
Preferred locations: Belfast, Northern Ireland / Dublin, Ireland
Own production operations across EMEA for a U.S.-based financial technology company supporting global financial markets.
Xelure Technologies is recruiting on behalf of our U.S.-based FinTech partner for an experienced Senior DevOps Engineer to take a key role in supporting its clients and production operations across EMEA.
Our partner is a U.S.-based financial technology company providing technology and services supporting sophisticated financial-market participants. Its environment sits at the intersection of internal technology, external systems, and business-critical financial workflows.
Our partner operates a remote-first model in EMEA, with an existing distributed team across Northern Ireland. While there is currently no physical EMEA office, the team occasionally comes together in Belfast for in-person training, collaboration, and team-building, so some travel will be required.
The role also includes participation in weekend and/or on-call coverage rotations, with the specific schedule and frequency determined by operational requirements.
The Role
As the Senior DevOps Engineer supporting EMEA, you will be a senior-level individual contributor, not a people manager, with significant autonomy and hands-on responsibility for production support, incident response, troubleshooting, automation, and customer-facing technical operations during EMEA hours.
You’ll go beyond monitoring and escalation by investigating issues, making evidence-based technical judgments, communicating clearly with customers and colleagues, and knowing when to resolve problems independently or bring in the right specialists.
Working across production systems, applications, databases, networking, logs, and monitoring tools, you’ll also help strengthen operations through better automation, runbooks, documentation, incident management, and observability practices.
What You'll Be Doing
- Monitor and support business-critical production environments during EMEA operating hours, proactively identifying potential issues, responding to alerts, and owning routine Level 1 incidents and service requests through resolution or appropriate escalation.
- Troubleshoot across Linux systems, applications, databases, networking, customer connectivity, and external dependencies, using logs and system data to investigate customer-specific activity and identify failure domains.
- Handle customer support calls and emails during EMEA core hours, communicating clearly and providing accurate updates even when the root cause is still being investigated.
- Develop Python, shell, and utility scripts to automate operational tasks and improve efficiency.
- Work with PostgreSQL, including connectivity testing, data loading/dumping, schema-related troubleshooting, and query optimization.
- Support Git and CI/CD workflows and troubleshoot deployment and operational issues.
- Work with monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability tools, contributing to improvements in operational visibility and practices.
- Improve runbooks and knowledge documentation, participate in postmortems, and help strengthen incident-management processes.
- Participate in weekend and/or on-call coverage rotations based on operational requirements.
What We're Looking For
Industry Experience
You should bring hands-on financial markets experience, with exposure to capital markets, trading technology, or financial-services technology environments, including B2B customer support and business-critical systems connecting internal applications with external or customer platforms. FIX Protocol knowledge is a plus but not required.
Technical Background
You should bring strong hands-on experience with:
- Linux production environments, including shell, SSH, filesystem navigation, systemctl, cron/crontab, sudo, and production-safe troubleshooting.
- Linux log investigation, including tools such as grep, awk, sort, and uniq, and working efficiently with large or compressed log files. Ability to investigate structured logs and customer-specific transactions or activity without unnecessarily moving production data locally.
- Python 3, particularly scripting, automation, operational tooling, and one-off utilities; familiarity with Python's C API is an advantage for debugging or extending applications.
- Airflow and workflow orchestration, with experience supporting or troubleshooting Airflow jobs or comparable workflow technologies.
- C code troubleshooting, with the ability to read C code when required. Development in C is not expected.
- Multithreading and long-running applications, with an understanding of how these behave in production environments.
- PostgreSQL, including connectivity testing, data loading/dumping, schema concepts and design, and query optimization.
- Message buses and middleware technologies, including troubleshooting communication and integration between systems.
- Git and CI/CD pipelines.
- Networking fundamentals, including connectivity testing, DNS, and VPN troubleshooting.
- Monitoring, logging, alerting, metrics, and observability tools.
- Ansible and infrastructure/operational automation.
- Basic Windows troubleshooting, including supporting and debugging Windows-based custom application installations.
- LLM tools, with familiarity using them for coding, technical learning, and building lightweight skills or bots.
The Way You Work Matters
The strongest candidate will be someone who:
- Thinks critically and uses evidence, distinguishing facts from assumptions and clearly explaining the reasoning behind technical conclusions or recommendations.
- Stays calm under pressure, communicates clearly during production incidents, and can explain what is known, what is still being investigated, and what happens next.
- Exercises sound judgment, knowing when to apply a quick operational fix, when deeper investigation is needed, and when to bring in the right specialists.
- Handles customer interactions professionally, particularly when customers are under pressure or affected by a production issue.
- Works independently and communicates proactively in a highly asynchronous, distributed environment, including clearly communicating when blocked and knowing when to ask for help.
- Learns quickly and stays curious, with the ability to understand unfamiliar systems, services, and technologies and expand their technical range over time.
- Shares knowledge and improves how the team works, documenting what they learn, strengthening runbooks and the knowledge base, and helping reduce reliance on tribal knowledge.
- Has excellent spoken and written English, with the ability to communicate technical information clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Work Location: Remote
