We are a specialist third-party pensions administrator.
Founded in 2006, our mission is to set the highest standard of pensions administration by any recognised measure. We aim to achieve this through sustained investment in our people, processes and systems.
We started life as an in-house administrator. Our foundations are in quality and member experience. Since our creation, we have grown as a third-party administrator. Adopting technology and innovation from across the market, we have emerged as a business of administration experts.
With offices in London and Farnborough, we hold internationally recognised accreditations for quality, security, development, customer service and environmental protection.
Main purpose of the role
The DevOps Engineer is responsible for designing, building, supporting, and continuously improving the environments, CI/CD pipelines, and platform automation capabilities that enable product teams to deliver change safely and at pace. The role will work closely with multiple Agile product teams to ensure environments, deployment tooling, infrastructure, and release pipelines are available before development begins, removing delivery blockers and accelerating time to market. This role is critical to the successful delivery of the pension platform technical upgrade programme, wider pensions platform modernisation, and the adoption of modern engineering practices across the technology estate. Strong skills in Python are also required both for the scripting and automation required for GitLab CI/CD pipelines and potential involvement in Python centric systems development alongside primary DevOps responsibilities.
Key responsibilities
Agile Delivery Enablement
- Embed within Agile product teams and work closely with Product Owners, Developers, QA, and Business Analysts.
- Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, retrospectives, and release planning.
- Ensure DevOps deliverables are identified early and prioritised alongside application work.
- Make sure required environments, infrastructure, access, pipelines, and deployment tooling are ready before development starts.
- Remove technical blockers that could delay sprint commitments or release milestones.
- Support multiple product teams simultaneously while maintaining delivery focus.
Environment Strategy & Management
- Own creation and lifecycle management of Development, SIT, UAT, Pre-Production, and Production environments.
- Build consistent, repeatable environments using Infrastructure as Code.
- Ensure environments are available when needed, correctly configured, scalable, secure and cost effective
- Coordinate environment refreshes, patching, cloning, and test data management.
- Support environment readiness for pension platform technical upgrade delivery.
CI/CD Pipeline Ownership
- Design, build, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines supporting multiple product teams.
- Automate code build, unit testing, security scans, packaging, deployment and release approval processes.
- Ensure pipelines are reusable, standardised, and easy for teams to adopt.
- Improve deployment frequency while reducing failure rates.
- Provide self-service deployment capability where appropriate.
Containerisation & Kubernetes Delivery
- Build and maintain container-based deployment capability using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Create and manage Helm charts for application deployment across environments.
- Standardise Kubernetes release patterns for consistency and reliability.
- Support scaling, resilience, secrets management, config management, and health checks.
- Work with teams to modernise legacy applications where appropriate.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
- Use Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Bash, or similar tools to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration.
- Manage cloud and on-prem resources through code with proper version control and approvals.
- Promote reusable modules, templates, and engineering standards.
- Reduce manual setup effort and improve environment consistency.
Upgrade & Change Programme Support
- Provide DevOps leadership for the technical and associated platform changes.
- Support environment provisioning, release planning, deployment rehearsals, cutover preparation, rollback planning and go-live readiness.
- Coordinate technical delivery across internal teams and third-party suppliers.
Python Projects
- Work closely with Business Analyst to under requirements.
- Where involved in Python projects building new capabilities, alongside core DevOps responsibilities, follow full DevOps processes for the software lifecycle.
- Develop using Agile methodology delivering regular increments and gaining feedback from BAs and business stakeholders.
- Produce automated testing scripts for the new software
Security, Risk & Controls
- Embed DevSecOps practices into delivery pipelines.
- Implement controls such as SAST and DAST scanning, dependency checks, secrets management, role-based access controls and audit logging.
- Ensure segregation of duties and controlled production releases.
- Maintain evidence for audit and regulatory review.
Observability & Reliability
- Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging across environments and pipelines.
- Track service health, deployment success, failures, and platform performance.
- Support root cause analysis and continuous improvement after incidents.
- Improve reliability and reduce repeat issues.
Stakeholder Management
- Act as trusted DevOps partner to product teams, business stakeholders, and suppliers.
- Communicate clearly on delivery readiness, risks, dependencies, and timelines.
- Translate technical constraints into business language.
- Build strong working relationships across engineering and operations.
Continuous Improvement
- Drive adoption of modern engineering practices across the organisation.
- Identify opportunities to increase automation, reduce lead time for change, improve release confidence, standardise tooling and increase developer productivity.
- Coach teams on DevOps ways of working.
Key Skills & Experience
- Proven DevOps / Platform Engineering experience in complex enterprise environments.
- Strong Agile delivery experience supporting multiple Scrum or product teams.
- Hands-on experience with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes, Docker, and GitLab CI, Azure DevOps or Jenkins.
- Strong Python skills essential
- Strong scripting skills (PowerShell, Bash).
- Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS.
- Strong understanding of networking, infrastructure, and security controls.
- Experience building scalable CI/CD operating models.
Desirable
- Experience within pensions administration, insurance, or regulated financial services.
- Knowledge of pension administration systems.
- Experience of Python Django web server.
- Experience with hybrid cloud environments.
- Exposure to SRE practices and platform engineering models.
- Experience supporting legacy to modern platform transformation.
Personal qualities
- Delivery focused and proactive
- Calm under pressure
- Highly organised
- Strong ownership mindset
- Collaborative and pragmatic
- Comfortable challenging constructively
- Passionate about engineering excellence
Reporting line
Reports to: Head of IT
