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.

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.

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.

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.

At Hays, we share a passion for creating a culture where there are 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 with us.