Senior Software Engineer

As a senior technical member of a Hosting team, the Senior Engineer leads the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of the team's services, driving the shift toward managing and delivering those services through code and automation. The role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership, setting standards for quality and helping shape the technical direction of the team's service domain. Operating with a high degree of autonomy, the Senior Engineer is a technical reference point for the team, coaches less experienced engineers, and partners with the Product Owner to translate strategy into a deliverable technical roadmap that supports the broader organisation.

Responsibilities:

• Leading the design and delivery of complex engineering work to a high standard.
• Championing code-based delivery, infrastructure-as-code, automated pipelines, and product-as-code practices and maturing the team's adoption.
• Owning the reliability, security, and resilience of the team's services.
• Setting and upholding engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Coaching and mentoring Associate and Engineer-level team members.
• Partnering with the Product Owner to shape the technical roadmap and backlog.
• Engineering and Execution: Lead the design and delivery of complex hosting infrastructure in alignment with multi-year strategies, architectural patterns, and technology roadmaps. Drive and design the maturity of infrastructure-as-code and configuration-as-code, establishing reusable patterns, version control (Github) and robust peer-review practices across the team.
• Operational Excellence and Resiliency: Own the end-to-end reliability, performance, capacity planning and Disaster Recovery (DR) readiness of the hosting footprint. Lead incident and problem resolution for complex, major issues; drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.
• Automation and Continuous Improvement: Design, build and continuously mature automated build, test, release and publishing pipelines to eliminate manual toil, mature operational capabilities, and accelerate delivery speeds. Define and embed automated verification smoke tests and health assertions so that the team's products carry their own correctness checks as part of the delivery process.
• Leadership Governance and Risk: Ensure all work aligns with cyber, Risk, architectural, and Service Management standards in all work, and help ensure team compliance. Uphold engineering excellence by setting team standards, contributing to cross-team/cross-tower technical initiatives, and mentoring Associate and Mid-level engineers.
• Collaboration and Support: Act as the primary technical point of contact for the team, collaborating effectively with developers, IT domains, vendor partners, and business stakeholders to deliver high-quality infrastructure outcomes.
• Document system configurations and ensure their ongoing maintenance where applicable using the latest technologies, including AI where applicable.

Demonstrated capabilities in the following:

• Platform and Ecosystem Modernisation: Extensive experience deploying, configuring, and optimising large-scale infrastructure environments across public cloud, hybrid cloud, or core operating systems/database ecosystems.
• Declarative Engineering and Code-Driven Infrastructure: Strong understanding of managing systems through code (e. g., Infrastructure as Code, Configuration as Code, Data Definition Language) to ensure environments are repeatable, version-controlled, and audited.
• Automation and Pipeline Execution: Deep knowledge and experience working within deployment lifecycles, automated testing, or Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to accelerate delivery and reduce manual intervention.
• Advanced Systems Observability: Expertise utilising modern monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting frameworks to maintain system health, detect performance anomalies, and rapidly isolate faults in complex, distributed systems.
• Security and Compliance Guardrails: Expertise embedding compliance policies, access control frameworks (IAM/RBAC), and security standards directly into daily engineering practices.
• SRE Mindset and Toil Elimination: A proven focus on permanent reliability engineering; ability to analyse system failures (Root Cause Analysis) and engineer automated fixes to permanently eliminate manual operational toil.
• Analytical Problem Solving: Exceptional diagnostic skills with a methodical approach to troubleshooting and resolving high-pressure incidents across interconnected platform layers.
• Cross-Functional Stakeholder Collaboration: Ability to effectively partner, communicate, and translate technical requirements between Product Owners, application developers, and strategic vendor partners.

Requirements:

• Approximately 10+ years of commercial experience in a dedicated engineering role within complex, enterprise-scale environments.
• Code-Driven Practices: Minimum 5+ years of hands-on experience utilising code-driven methodologies (such as Infrastructure as Code, Configuration as Code, or automated scripting languages) to manage and scale platforms.
• Legacy to Modern Transitions: Direct experience migrating legacy systems or manual operational workflows over to modern, highly automated, and resilient target-state architectures.
• Incident Ownership and SRE Practice: Demonstrated experience leading root-cause analysis (RCA) investigations and implementing permanent engineering fixes to eliminate systemic operational toil.
• Secure Engineering Practice: Proven experience hardening enterprise environments against cyber threats and a track record of successfully driving rapid patch management or vulnerability remediation campaigns in production environments.
• Squad-Based Delivery: Proven experience working within an Agile framework, Product-operating model, or DevOps squad environment, collaborating daily with Product Owners and Scrum Masters to deliver platform features.
• Purpose-Driven Innovation: Above all, we are seeking collaborative innovators and progressive technical thinkers who don't just maintain the status quo but actively help us engineer better ways to bring a little good to everyone, every day.

Key Relationships:

• Platform Manager (technical partnership on roadmap and delivery).
• Associate and Mid-level Engineers (coaching and technical guidance).
• Principal Engineers and Heads of (for technical direction and escalation).
• Peers across other Hosting teams and towers.
• Technical Business Analysts.
• Architects - Technical, Infrastructure, Solution, Domain.
• Vendors and Managed Service Providers.
• Platform and Domain Enablement teams.
• Service Management, Cyber, and Risk teams (for standards and process alignment).

Application Services - Config-as-Code:

• Automation Platform Architecture: Manage, scale, and maintain the enterprise automation control plane (Ansible Automation Platform - AAP), ensuring high availability, performance, and platform resilience.
• Role-Based Access and Governance: Design and enforce centralised execution environments, inventory management, and strict RBAC to ensure secure, compliant automation execution across the group.
• Pipeline Integration and Execution Fabrics: Architect the integration touchpoints between the Ansible platform and upstream CI/CD engines (such as Azure DevOps and Harness) to deliver seamless, end-to-end infrastructure orchestration.
• Module and Collections Governance: Curate, validate, and publish standardised, secure Ansible Collections and execution environments, providing the foundational scaffolding for product squads to utilise safely.
• Enterprise Secrets Management: Define and govern secure credential storage by managing enterprise integrations with cloud-native secret stores (Azure Key Vault and GCP Secret Manager).