Senior DevOps Engineer

Location: Remote

Salary: £70,000 - £80,000

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. 

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. 

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. 

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. 

We are looking for an experienced and dynamic Senior DevOps Engineer to join our Engineering team and help us improve the resilience and performance of the Arbor platform, enabling the business to rapidly scale. The remit and focus of the role is to continuously fix and improve our architecture, infrastructure, and ways of working. This requires an obsessive, metrics-driven approach, a curiosity about system behaviour, and close collaboration with the solution architect and engineering teams. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re a collaborative and curious Engineer, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

• Work with Head of Platform and Head of SRE to identify improvements within the platform infrastructure and implement plans to address
• Work with the Platform teams to improve the maturity of all components within the system, including ensuring High Availability, and adequate testing and DR plans
• Contribute to improving our CI/CD pipelines and providing patterns of deployment
• Assist in incident response and resolution, and subsequent post-mortems and retrospectives
• Participate in tech-talks and team based learning to ensure knowledge is spread
• Document obsessively, relying on Playbooks/Runbooks and systems documentation to aid knowledge transfer

• Extensive experience of DevOps Engineering and operating a large scale platform
• Extensive experience of distributed cloud systems, and specifically Amazon Web Services
• Extensive experience of Infrastructure as Code tooling, such as Terraform, Ansible, Cloudformation etc
• Understanding of relational database technologies and their cloud versions (e.g. AWS Aurora)
• Experience with messaging and distributed asynchronous workloads
• Experience with nginx or similar technologies
• Experience with DataDog, Prometheus or similar tools
• A positive and proactive attitude to problem solving 
• A team player, willing to muck in and help others when needed, driven personality who asks questions and actively participates in discussions
• Good written and spoken English so you can present your ideas

Bonus skills

• Past experience with enterprise solutions running at scale
• Familiarity with kanban and agile development processes
• Experience with Docker and containerisation
• Familiarity with software best practices such as Refactoring, Clean Code, Domain-Driven Design, Test-Driven Development, etc.

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [email protected].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [email protected] 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.