Senior Associate Engineer (Digital Product Team)

Canada Life; West of England; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Canada Life UK is seeking a Senior Associate Engineer to design, build and run features across the stack, with a passion for production stability. You will be a capable, hands‑on developer who enjoys designing and building features and running them in production, embracing the company’s blended model of development and operations.

You will work with C# and the .NET stack, own CI/CD pipelines, automate deployments, and improve observability in Azure, following the "you build it, you run it"

Qualifications

• Solid working knowledge of C# and the .NET stack.
• Experience with DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with production operations, SRE, observability and telemetry.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and run features across front and back ends.
• Collaborate across teams to deliver end‑to‑end solutions.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Instrument services with meaningful observability and respond to incidents.

Skills

C#

.NET stack

SRE

CI/CD

DevOps

Observability

Azure

Front-end & back-end

Tools

Azure

CI/CD tooling

Observability tools

Job description

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation. Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues. Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Summary

Are you a software developer who loves not just building great products, but running them in production too? We are seeking a talented Senior Associate Engineer to join our dynamic cross-functional team and help shape the future of digital innovation. First and foremost you will be a capable, hands‑on developer who enjoys designing and building features across the stack, and, as a broad, T‑shaped engineer, you will also bring a particular interest in the operational side of engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), observability, and the delivery pipelines that get our work safely to production. This is a blended role: you will spend plenty of your time building product features as well as running them, and you will genuinely enjoy both. If you are passionate about Digital products, technology, and driving meaningful outcomes, this is the role for you! CLUK have ambitious plans to modernise their IT (Information Technology) estate, looking to leverage the cloud and automation at every opportunity and change how we fundamentally deliver solutions, transitioning from a Project to Product approach. You will be working at every stage of a product lifecycle deployment, from conception, design, implementation, testing and through to operational support, living our "you build it, you run it" philosophy.

Job Purpose

As a Senior Associate Engineer you will be a capable software developer, comfortable designing and building features across the stack, with a solid grounding in full lifecycle software development. On top of that, you will have a genuine interest in what happens after the code is written, how we deploy, operate, observe, and continuously improve our services in production. Designing, building, deploying, and supporting software across front and backend stacks Building and maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines and test automation to facilitate a seamless, repeatable route to production for Azure hosted solutions Operating and supporting environments up to and including production, instrumenting services with meaningful observability so we can trust our releases and respond quickly when something goes wrong You will also have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes, and you want to make data-informed decisions.

Duties/Responsibilities

Design and build product features across the front and back end, engaging fully in the development lifecycle of applications and tools and contributing hands‑on to all development tasks, from coding to reviewing and releasing to production. Collaborate closely with team members, product owners, and stakeholders. Live the "you build it, you run it" model. Implement and refine DevOps practices, building and owning CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure as code, and instrumenting services with observability (metrics, logs, and traces) so their health is visible. Take part in operating live services, including release management, alerting, and incident response, while actively reducing toil, technical debt, and manual effort through automation. Take ownership of personal learning paths, continually acquiring new skills, particularly across operations, SRE, and observability, to enhance team solutions and individual performance.

Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

You are a capable, hands‑on software developer who enjoys designing and building product features across the front and back end. The operations and SRE focus in this role is something you bring in addition to strong development skills, not instead of them, and you should be equally happy shipping product features as you are improving how we run them. You have developed modern component-oriented front end applications using frameworks and libraries and have a good appreciation of UX (User eXperience). Solid working knowledge of C# and the .NET stack. Our current tech stack is primarily Microsoft / Azure focused; C# is our primary language. Advocate of key principles such as SOLID and CLEAN code, applying to all areas of development. Keen to write code that is self-explanatory and easy to maintain. You have a sound grasp of modern engineering principles and prefer working in small iterations that optimise feedback. You like to validate hypotheses vi