Senior Dev Ops Engineer

Senior Dev Ops Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer

Reporting to: Head of Software Excellence

Location: UK

Role Objectives

• Drive DevOps Excellence by fostering, teaching, and embedding DevOps best practices across Hays projects, ensuring teams adopt consistent engineering, automation, deployment, and operational standards.

• Provide Technical Leadership & Mentorship by acting as a senior coach and trusted advisor to DevOps Engineers, supporting capability development through hands-on guidance, reviews, knowledge sharing, and best-practice frameworks.

• Ensure SDLC Governance & Compliance by auditing projects against Hays SDLC standards, driving adherence to quality gates, security controls, documentation requirements, traceability standards, and audit-ready delivery practices.

• Own Global DevOps Tooling & Standards by designing, implementing, and maintaining shared platforms, CI/CD frameworks, automation capabilities, reusable templates, and engineering patterns that enable scalable and efficient software delivery.

• Champion Continuous Improvement by identifying delivery bottlenecks, promoting automation, improving engineering maturity, and driving the adoption of modern Agile and DevOps ways of working across the organisation.

• Build Strategic Cross-Functional Partnerships by collaborating closely with Solution Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, QA & Testing, Product, and Delivery teams to align engineering practices, non-functional requirements, and operational readiness.

• Promote Engineering Excellence at Scale by establishing and maintaining reusable best practices, standards, and governance frameworks that improve consistency, quality, security, reliability, and delivery performance across all projects.

• Act as a Trusted Engineering Advisor by influencing technical decision-making, communicating risks and recommendations clearly, and ensuring engineering outcomes align with Hays' strategic objectives and SDLC principles.

Key Results / Areas

DevOps Best Practice Adoption

• Project teams actively use standardised DevOps practices for source control, branching, build, test, deployment, release, and operational readiness.

• Delivery teams understand how DevOps practices connect to SDLC compliance, engineering quality, deployment safety, and business delivery outcomes.

• DevOps maturity gaps are visible, prioritised, and addressed through clear improvement plans.

2. SDLC Governance and Audit Readiness

• Projects are reviewed against Hays SDLC best practices, with transparent findings, pragmatic recommendations, and clear follow-up actions.

• Quality gates, compliance checkpoints, pull request discipline, testing evidence, release artefacts, and documentation standards are consistently applied.

• Audit outcomes and lessons learned are fed back into the continuous improvement of SDLC guidance, templates, and tooling.

3. Global Tooling and Reusable Engineering Templates

• Common CI/CD templates, automation patterns, infrastructure-as-code templates, testing templates, and release standards are created, maintained, and easy for teams to adopt.

• Global tooling supports consistent delivery, secure dependency management, traceability, quality reporting, and operational reliability.

• Teams reduce manual effort, avoid duplicated work, and accelerate delivery through reusable engineering assets.

Mentoring and Capability Development

• Project-based DevOps Engineers receive practical mentoring, pipeline reviews, design guidance, and structured feedback.

• Knowledge is shared through playbooks, templates, examples, communities of practice, and hands-on enablement sessions.

• The role contributes to a stronger internal DevOps capability and reduces dependency on inconsistent project-by-project practices.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Solution Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, QA and Testing, and delivery teams are engaged early to align non-functional requirements, security expectations, data needs, and operational readiness.

• Technical decisions are made transparently, with outcomes or trade-offs clearly communicated and aligned to Hays standards.

• A one-team approach is fostered across internal teams, vendors, and project delivery groups.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Skills

• Senior-level hands-on DevOps engineering experience in complex enterprise environments, ideally across globally distributed delivery teams.

• Strong practical understanding of modern SDLC governance, DevOps ways of working, agile delivery, quality gates, and audit-ready software delivery practices.

• Proven experience designing, improving, and operating CI/CD pipelines for multiple technology stacks and deployment models.

• Experience creating reusable engineering templates, standards, and playbooks that are adopted by multiple teams rather than one isolated project.

• Strong working knowledge of Azure DevOps and/or GitHub, Git-based source control, pull request workflows, build and release pipelines, pipeline as code, and secure branching practices.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code and automation approaches, for example Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent.

• Good understanding of cloud-native delivery patterns across Azure and/or AWS, including container images, container registries, Kubernetes or comparable container services, environment promotion, network and security considerations, and operational monitoring.

• Experience integrating quality and security checks into pipelines, including unit tests, integration tests, automated regression tests, static code analysis, dependency scanning, secret scanning, and deployment approvals.

• Ability to review project delivery practices objectively, document findings clearly, and coach teams towards pragmatic improvement without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Behavioural & Interpersonal Traits

• Mentorship & Coaching – Passionate about developing DevOps Engineers and enabling project teams through guidance, knowledge sharing, and best practices.

• Strong Communication in Remote-First Environments – Effectively communicates across global teams, building alignment and collaboration in distributed and hybrid working models.

• Stakeholder Management & Collaboration – Natural collaborator who builds trusted and effective working relationships across Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, QA, Product, and Delivery teams.

• Continuous Improvement & Ownership – Proactively identifies opportunities to simplify, automate, and optimise delivery while taking accountability for outcomes and quality.

Preferred Qualifications and Certifications

• Degree in computer science, software engineering, information technology, or equivalent practical experience.

• Microsoft Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub, Azure DevOps, or security-related certifications are advantageous.

• Experience working in agile delivery teams

• Experience working with audit-conscious enterprise technology environments

• Experience supporting large-scale transformation, SDLC standardisation, DevOps adoption, or platform/tooling consolidation initiatives

• Indicative experience: 5-8 years in DevOps, platform engineering, software engineering, release engineering, or related roles, with senior ownership and mentoring responsibilities.

Languages

• Proficient in spoken and written English.

• Comfortable communicating in a remote-first, multilingual, global environment.

At Hays, we share a passion for creating a culture of opportunities for our people to flourish and succeed, whatever your background. We know that diversity of perspective and an inclusive approach, which encourages those experiences and views to be heard, is great for business and therefore your career.