Overview

JOB TITLE: Lead DevOps Engineer
SALARY: £70,929 - £86,692 (Manchester); £81,999 - £100,222 (London only)
LOCATION: Manchester or London
HOURS: Full-time
WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites

Join us as a Lead DevOps Engineer and shape the future of our infrastructure with innovation and leadership.

About this opportunity
We are seeking a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineer with a strong background in design experience to join our innovative Core Banking Platform team. As the Lead DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining robust infrastructure, automation processes, and practices with a focus on sustainability and reliability. Additionally, you will play a pivotal role in coaching and mentoring team members to enhance their skills and capabilities in DevOps methodologies, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.

The Core Banking Platform team work together to curate and deliver the future core banking systems for the UK's largest retail bank such as setting up a new Cloud native Microservices platform that will function as the epicenter of the bank of future. They are following a mission critical roadmap consisting of migrations and go-lives of products that will contribute massively to the transformation goals of Lloyds Banking Group.

The ideal candidate will be comfortable in a customer focused and engineering driven environment where they can put their excellent CI/CD knowledge to use and embrace new tools and Cloud technologies.

Day to day, you will

• Contribute to the provisioning of data products to support an exit from legacy systems to a key strategic platform
• Design and Architectural Planning: Lead the design and architectural planning of our infrastructure, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment with business goals and technical requirements. Mentor junior team members in architectural best practices and design principles.
• Infrastructure Automation: Design and implement automation solutions for provisioning, configuration management, and deployment processes. Leverage infrastructure as code (IaC) principles and tools to ensure consistency, repeatability, and scalability. Mentor team members in automation techniques and best practices.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate software delivery processes. Ensure code releases are seamless, reliable, and efficient, with minimal downtime. Provide guidance and mentorship on CI/CD pipeline design and optimization.
• Monitoring and Alerting: Implement robust monitoring and alerting solutions to proactively detect and respond to system issues and performance bottlenecks. Configure monitoring tools to collect metrics, logs, and traces for analysis and troubleshooting. Coach team members in effective monitoring strategies and tools utilization.
• Security and Compliance: Collaborate with security teams to implement security best practices and compliance standards. Ensure infrastructure and applications are protected against security threats and vulnerabilities. Provide guidance and mentorship on security practices and compliance requirements.
• Capacity Planning and Performance Optimization: Perform capacity planning exercises to anticipate resource requirements and scale infrastructure accordingly. Optimize system performance through performance tuning and load testing. Coach team members in capacity planning methodologies and performance optimization techniques.
• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Create comprehensive documentation for infrastructure configurations, processes, and best practices. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous learning within the team. Mentor team members in documentation practices and knowledge sharing initiatives.

Why Lloyds Banking Group

We're on an exciting journey and there couldn't be a better time to join us. The investments we're making in our people, data, and technology are leading to innovative projects, fresh possibilities, and countless new ways for our people to work, learn, and thrive.

What you'll need

• Demonstrable experience using Jenkins, Harness, Github, Nexus, Spinnaker, Terraform, and Backstage
• Proven experience in a Lead DevOps Engineer role, with a focus on infrastructure design and reliability engineering
• Strong understanding of cloud computing principles and experience with GCP
• Proficient hands-on experience in architecting and building ephemeral environments utilising public Cloud Platforms (preferably GCP)
• Proven track record of implementing FinOps strategies aligning with organisational financial goals
• Proficiency in scripting and programming languages (BASH/Python)
• Demonstrable experience of event stream platforms such as Kafka
• Proven experience working with service mesh platforms (Istio)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Kubernetes)
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (Terraform)
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, version control systems, and release management practices
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace)
• Knowledge of security best practices, compliance standards, and incident response protocols.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to troubleshoot complex technical issues.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

And any experience of these would be really useful

• Experience using Thought Machine Vault
• Advanced certifications in GCP & Kubernetes
• Experience with microservices architecture, serverless computing, and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of software-defined networking (SDN) and infrastructure automation frameworks.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies and working in cross-functional teams.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it's why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We're disability confident. So if you'd like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know

Benefits

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

This is a once in a career opportunity to help shape your future as well as ours. Join us and grow with purpose.