Senior Operations Engineer
Amplience • Middlesbrough, England, United Kingdom
Description
As a Senior Operations Engineer, you'll be involved with the design and evolution of our cloud infrastructure while mentoring within the operations team. You'll drive architectural decisions, establish best practices, and work closely with leadership to scale our systems for growth. This role is ideal for someone with deep expertise in cloud platforms (especially AWS), proven leadership in infrastructure projects, and a track record of building reliable, secure systems at scale.
Key Responsibilities
* Design, architect, and optimise cloud infrastructure on AWS, ensuring scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness.
* Lead the implementation of security frameworks, including advanced IAM architectures, compliance controls, threat modeling, and security automation.
* Champion infrastructure‑as‑code practices and drive adoption of automation across the organization using tools like AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and Terraform.
* Contribute to change management processes, establishing standards for planning, risk assessment, documentation, and rollback procedures.
* Lead incident response efforts, conduct thorough post‑mortems, and implement preventive measures to improve system reliability.
* Partner with engineering and product teams on strategic architecture decisions, capacity planning, and platform evolution.
* Establish and enforce standards for secrets management, credential lifecycle, and secure configuration management.
* Mentor junior and mid‑level engineers, conducting code reviews and sharing expertise across the team.
* Define and evolve internal documentation standards, runbooks, and knowledge‑sharing practices.
What You’ll Bring (Skills, Experience & Mindset)
Skills & Experience
* Extensive hands‑on experience architecting and operating production AWS environments at scale.
* Deep understanding of the AWS Well‑Architected Framework and ability to apply it to complex system designs.
* Expert‑level knowledge of Linux systems administration and performance tuning (Fedora, RHEL, etc.).
* Strong networking expertise (DNS, VPCs, firewalls, ACLs, routing, load balancing, etc.).
* Working knowledge of DNS, CDN, caching, firewalls, load balancers, and WAFs to ensure secure and performant web delivery.
* Proven expertise with IaC tooling including AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and Terraform, including module/library design.
* Advanced scripting and automation capabilities in Bash, Python, or Go.
* Excellent knowledge of modern observability tools and a demonstrated ability to implement the SRE approach to reliability (SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, eliminating toil).
* Comprehensive understanding of security best practices, including zero‑trust architectures, compliance requirements, and security tooling.
* Demonstrated experience building and optimizing CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
* Ability to participate in 24/7 support rotations and respond to incidents effectively.
* Proven ability to prioritize competing demands, lead cross‑functional initiatives, and deliver results in fast‑paced environments.
Mindset & Approach
* Customer and team centric with strong stakeholder management skills.
* Comfortable working independently on assigned tasks while collaborating with wider teams.
* Passionate about continuous improvement with an automation‑first mindset, knowledge sharing, and developing team capabilities.
* Strategic thinker with excellent judgment in balancing short‑term needs with long‑term architectural goals.
* Effective communicator who can translate technical concepts for varied audiences.
Additional Skills
* Deep experience with serverless architectures and container orchestration platforms (ECS, EKS, Kubernetes).
* Proven track record with observability platforms like CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar.
* Experience establishing SRE practices, incident management processes, and reliability engineering culture.
* Direct experience implementing compliance frameworks (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC2, PCI‑DSS) or relevant security certifications.
Benefits
* Auto‑enrolled after 3 months’ service.
* Salary sacrifice scheme to maximise tax efficiency.
* 5 % employee contribution, matched by 5 % from Amplience.
* Pension broker: Titan Group (offers financial advice).
* Pension provider: Aegon (moved from Aviva in 2024).
* 25 days paid holiday as standard, plus length‑of‑service‑based increases up to 30 days.
* Enhanced maternity leave: 12 weeks full pay, 12 weeks at 50 % pay, 15 weeks statutory maternity pay, 13 weeks unpaid.
* Enhanced paternity leave: 2 weeks full pay.
* Up to one month’s full pay per calendar year for sickness, subject to medical certificate.
* 5 days study leave for accredited long‑term courses (12+ months).
* Birthday leave: One paid day off during your birthday month.
* Company‑wide recharge days: One day off per quarter for the whole business.
* Flexible working – all roles laptop‑enabled, working arrangements agreed with line manager, Freedom Fridays for full‑time employees.
* Holiday buy scheme: purchase up to 5 extra days per year, repaid through salary deductions.
* Cycle to work scheme, tech scheme, season ticket loan, charity/volunteer days, payroll giving, eyecare reimbursement.
* Employee referral bonus: £1,000 paid 50 % at 4 months, 50 % at 7 months post‑hire.
Seniority Level
Mid‑Senior Level
Employment Type
Full‑time
Job Function
Engineering and Information Technology – Software Development
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