Role: Senior DevOps Engineer
Salary: £70,000 - 90,000 DOE
Location: Southampton (hybrid - min 3 days per week on site)
We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to help us design and deliver our platform architecture on Microsoft Azure. You will bring deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native infrastructure, secure deployment practices, container orchestration, big data workloads and cost optimisation, and you will apply that expertise to build systems capable of operating reliably at global scale.
Senior DevOps Engineer, the role:
Architecture & Platform Design
Design the target-state platform architecture on Microsoft Azure, selecting appropriate modern Azure services and reference patterns for a large-scale, globally distributed software estate.
Architect scalable, resilient and secure infrastructure using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, choosing the right model for each workload.
Design content delivery and edge strategy using Azure Front Door and Azure CDN to deliver low-latency performance to a global user base.
Own the container orchestration strategy across Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Apps and serverless container options, and advise on where a service mesh (for example Istio or Linkerd) adds value.
Design and support large-scale data platform infrastructure, supporting the ingestion, storage, processing and querying of high-volume datasets using Azure data services such as Data Lake Storage, Databricks, Synapse Analytics and Event Hubs.
Document architecture decisions, trade-offs and standards so that they are transparent, repeatable and understood across the engineering teams.
Secure Deployment & DevSecOps
Embed security best practice into every layer of the platform, applying a defence-in-depth and zero-trust approach appropriate to a business handling sensitive financial and tax data.
Implement secure-by-design deployment pipelines, including secrets management (Azure Key Vault), identity and access management (Microsoft Entra ID), network segmentation and least-privilege access controls.
Integrate security scanning, policy-as-code and compliance guardrails into the delivery lifecycle using tools such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Azure Policy.
Work with the IT and security functions to ensure infrastructure meets internal governance, data protection and regulatory requirements.
Automation, CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions to enable fast, safe and repeatable deployments.
Define all infrastructure as code using Terraform and Bicep, promoting modular, reusable and version-controlled definitions.
Champion GitOps ways of working and automate provisioning, configuration and release management to reduce manual effort and human error.
Implement deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases to minimise risk and downtime.
Reliability, Observability & Cost Optimisation
Establish observability across the platform, including monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting (for example Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Log Analytics).
Drive reliability engineering practices, defining service level objectives and improving resilience, scalability and disaster recovery posture.
Lead on cloud cost optimisation (FinOps), continuously reviewing spend, right-sizing resources and building cost awareness into architecture and delivery decisions.
Respond to incidents, lead root-cause analysis and drive continuous improvement of the platform.
Collaboration & Leadership
Act as a technical authority on DevOps and cloud architecture across both the IT and Software Engineering departments.
Mentor and upskill software engineers on secure deployment, automation and cloud-native practices.
Partner closely with the Group IT Director to align the platform roadmap with wider business and technology strategy.
Contribute to a strong engineering culture built on quality, security, automation and shared ownership.
Senior DevOps Engineer, the person:
Essential Skills & Experience
Experience: 5 to 8 years of hands-on experience in DevOps, platform or cloud engineering, including production ownership of business-critical systems.
Azure: Deep, demonstrable expertise with Microsoft Azure, including core compute, networking, storage, identity and security services.
Kubernetes: Proven experience designing and running workloads on Kubernetes (AKS) at scale, including containerisation with Docker.
IaC: Strong hands-on experience with both Terraform and Bicep for infrastructure as code.
CI/CD: Practical experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions.
Security: Solid understanding of secure deployment, identity and access management, secrets management and network security in the cloud.
Scale: Experience designing for global scale, including CDN, edge delivery, high availability and disaster recovery.
Cost: Demonstrable experience of cloud cost optimisation and FinOps practices.
Big Data: Hands-on experience building or operating infrastructure for big data and high-volume data workloads, including distributed processing, data pipelines and scalable storage.
Automation: Strong scripting ability (for example PowerShell, Bash or Python) for automation.
Certification: A current, valid Microsoft Azure certification (for example AZ-400 Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions, or an Azure Administrator/Solutions Architect credential).
Communication: Ability to communicate architecture and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Desirable Skills & Experience
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert or a security-focused certification such as Azure Security Engineer Associate or CISSP.
Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) and advanced networking.
Experience in a regulated, financial services or compliance-driven environment.
Familiarity with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana or Datadog.
Experience with big data technologies and frameworks such as Azure Databricks, Synapse Analytics, Apache Spark, Kafka or Data Lake architectures.
Experience supporting multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction or globally distributed operations.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent
Senior DevOps Engineer, the benefits:
25 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
Annual leave purchase scheme (up to 5 days per year).
Company Pension scheme (Royal London).
Cycle2Work Scheme.
Private Healthcare Insurance (Vitality).
Flexible working.
Regular departmental socials, company wide.
ABOUT AVASK
AVASK Global Compliance are a rapidly expanding international firm that specialise in VAT, tax and accounting for e-commerce businesses.
AVASK assist hundreds of Amazon FBA sellers as well as entrepreneurs across eBay, Shopify and many other platforms. Providing clients with a comprehensive range of expertise - from practical guidance on cross-border transactions, to ensuring they are fully compliant.
