Senior DevOps Engineer

Role Overview

The role reports into the UK and involves regular collaboration with UK-based stakeholders and teams across OCU Digital.

The Senior DevOps Engineer is responsible for the design, governance and continuous improvement of DevOps and application reliability across OCU Digital, ensuring digital platforms are built, secured, deployed and operated efficiently, consistently and resiliently across all environments.

Working across OCU One, Data and Dynamics, the role sets and governs standards for CI/CD, build and release security, deployment automation, runtime configuration, observability and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), bridging Engineering, Cloud & Infrastructure, Security and Architecture.

Key Responsibilities

1. DevOps Tooling, Boards & Governance

• Own and govern the DevOps tooling landscape, with explicit accountability for Azure DevOps configuration and administration.
• Define and govern Azure DevOps Boards work item types, process templates and lifecycle models (e.g. Requirements, Change Requests, Work Requests, Bugs and Tasks).
• Own state models, mandatory fields, validation rules and workflow controls to ensure consistency, auditability and traceability.
• Ensure consistent usage of DevOps Boards across Digital platforms to support change control, compliance and reporting requirements.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability from demand intake through delivery, deployment and release.

2. DevOps & CI/CD Standards and Governance

• Define, own and continuously evolve CI/CD standards, templates and reusable pipeline patterns.
• Govern how build, test, security scanning, deployment and rollback stages are implemented across platforms.
• Enforce secure build and release practices aligned with security and architecture standards.
• Own the operation of CI/CD pipelines, ensuring reliability, performance and rapid recovery from failure.
• Provide clear guidance and decision-making on CI/CD tooling, patterns and usage.

3. Deployment, Environment & Release Management

• Define standardised deployment and release models, including automated releases and rollback mechanisms.
• Manage environment strategies across development, test, QA and production environments.
• Govern access control and environment permissions in collaboration with Cloud & Infrastructure and Security.
• Ensure release processes are auditable, predictable and aligned to risk and change controls.
• Support platform teams during complex or high-risk releases.

4. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) & Performance Systems

• Design and govern the application-layer SRE monitoring and performance management system.
• Define and manage service reliability standards including SLIs, SLOs and error budgets.
• Build and standardise monitoring and observability dashboards covering availability, latency, errors and saturation.
• Lead reliability activities such as fault injection, resilience testing and reliability drills.
• Proactively identify reliability risks and drive preventative engineering improvements.

5. Observability, Incident Management & Operational Excellence

• Own the observability strategy, ensuring consistent use of metrics, logs and traces across platforms.
• Resolve major platform and application incidents, acting as incident commander when required.
• Ensure runbooks, handover packages and operational documentation are prepared and maintained.
• Lead post-incident reviews and ensure corrective actions are delivered and tracked.
• Improve operational maturity through standardised documentation, runbooks and operational tooling.

Key Skills & Experience

Essential Skills

• Extensive hands-on experience in DevOps and SRE practices in complex, multi-platform environments.
• Strong expertise in CI/CD tooling including Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
• Proven experience defining CI/CD standards, templates and secure build pipelines.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes and application runtime configuration.
• Strong background in SRE concepts including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and reliability governance.
• Experience designing monitoring, observability and performance management systems.
• Proven ability to lead and resolve high-severity platform incidents.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional working.
• Experience producing high-quality technical documentation and runbooks.

Desirable Skills

• Experience operating DevOps and SRE across custom applications, data platforms and SaaS environments.
• Familiarity with ISO27001, SOC2 or similar enterprise governance frameworks.
• Experience implementing DevSecOps controls and secure supply-chain practices.
• Experience running resilience testing, chaos engineering or fault injection exercises.
• Knowledge of Azure Fabric, Databricks or modern data platforms.
• Experience supporting business-critical or safety-sensitive systems.
• Track record of building and scaling DevOps capabilities in growing organisations.