Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer - Cherry Tree

Centric Talent; Lancashire; On-site; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Centric Talent is seeking a Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer to own and improve our production Linux and Windows infrastructure from our Blackburn head office, with 1–2 days on site.

You will drive automation with Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and disaster recovery planning, partnering with software developers and IT operations to ensure reliability.

The role emphasizes patching, monitoring, security, and on-call incident response to maintain business-critical services.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in DevOps, Systems/Admin, Platform Eng or similar role.

Responsibilities

• Administer, maintain and improve Linux and Microsoft server environments.
• Provision and configure new virtual machines, servers and supporting infrastructure.
• Deploy and configure applications and infrastructure components.
• Monitor health, performance, availability and security of production systems.
• Investigate incidents, performance issues and outages and implement fixes.
• Design monitoring, alerting and logging for new and existing systems.
• Manage configuration automation using Ansible.
• Support containerised environments using Docker, CRI-O and Kubernetes.
• Manage Kubernetes clusters, workloads and services.
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines and support releases with DevOps practices.
• Patch, upgrade and ensure security configurations and vulnerability remediation.
• Manage backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes.
• Document systems, recovery procedures and operational processes.

Skills

Ansible

Kubernetes

Linux

Windows Server

CI/CD

Terraform

Docker

Monitoring

Security

Problem Solving

Tools

Ansible

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Git

Terraform

Job description

Salary: £65,000 - 65,000 per year

Requirements:

• 5 years of professional experience in DevOps, Systems Administration, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering or a similar role.
• Significant hands-on experience operating production-grade infrastructure.
• Strong Linux administration experience.
• Practical experience across both Linux and Microsoft server estates.
• Proven experience managing infrastructure supporting business-critical applications.
• Experience taking ownership of complex technical problems with limited supervision.
• Proven ability to investigate unfamiliar systems and determine appropriate solutions.
• Experience improving infrastructure reliability, automation, security or operational efficiency.
• Previous experience operating in a senior or highly autonomous engineering role.
• Strong professional experience administering Linux server environments in production.
• Strong understanding of Linux system administration, including users and permissions, system services, package management, networking, storage and filesystems, scheduled tasks, logging, performance management and troubleshooting.
• Experience provisioning and configuring servers and virtual machines from initial deployment through to production readiness.
• Strong understanding of production infrastructure reliability, availability and operational support.
• Experience with system patching, upgrades and lifecycle management.
• Experience diagnosing complex infrastructure issues independently.
• Strong experience with system, application and security monitoring.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring and alerting for new infrastructure and applications.
• Ability to identify meaningful service health indicators and create appropriate alerts.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure security, access control, patch management, vulnerability remediation, system hardening, logging, auditing and certificate management.
• Experience responding to production incidents and security-related infrastructure issues.
• Strong understanding of backup, recovery and disaster recovery principles.
• Experience documenting and testing disaster recovery procedures.
• Strong working knowledge of Ansible.
• Experience using automation to manage server configuration, application deployment, package installation, security configuration, environment setup and recurring operational tasks.
• Ability to design reusable, maintainable and well-documented automation.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure automation and configuration management principles.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code concepts.
• Strong experience with Docker and containerised workloads.
• Experience with CRI-O, containerd or comparable container runtimes.
• Practical experience administering Kubernetes clusters in production or business-critical environments.
• Strong understanding of deployments, pods, services, ingress, persistent storage, secrets, configuration, resource allocation, cluster networking, availability, monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Ability to independently deploy, troubleshoot and maintain applications within Kubernetes.
• Experience supporting highly available containerised environments.
• Strong experience administering MySQL environments.
• Experience managing Galera Cluster or comparable highly available MySQL architectures.
• Good understanding of replication, backup and restore, performance monitoring, database troubleshooting, permissions and access, upgrades, clustering, high availability, failover and disaster recovery.
• Ability to investigate and resolve database performance and availability issues.
• Experience administering Microsoft SQL Server / MSSQL environments.
• Good understanding of database backup and recovery, permissions, maintenance, monitoring, performance, troubleshooting, availability, resilience.
• Strong experience administering Microsoft Windows Server environments.
• Experience installing, configuring and maintaining Windows-based servers and applications.
• Experience with system monitoring, patching, security and operational support.
• Strong understanding of Windows Server permissions, services and network configuration.
• Ability to troubleshoot Windows infrastructure and application issues independently.
• Experience supporting business-critical Microsoft workloads.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing, maintaining and troubleshooting automated deployment pipelines.
• Understanding of build, test and production deployment processes.
• Strong working knowledge of Git and modern source control workflows.
• Experience supporting software developers with infrastructure and deployment requirements.
• Ability to improve deployment reliability through automation and standardisation.
• Experience supporting multiple development, staging and production environments.
• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP / HTTPS, firewalls, VPNs, load balancing, reverse proxies and TLS / SSL certificates.
• Experience administering web servers such as Nginx and Apache.
• Understanding of highly available, multi-server environments.
• Ability to troubleshoot infrastructure issues across operating system, networking, database and application layers.
• Experience working alongside external infrastructure or managed service providers.
• Strong problem-solving and diagnostic capability.
• Comfortable being given an outcome or problem rather than a predefined technical solution.
• Able to independently investigate, evaluate options and implement appropriate solutions.
• Strong ownership mentality and willingness to take responsibility for systems through their full lifecycle.
• Proactive approach to identifying operational risks before they become incidents.
• Calm and methodical approach to production incidents and high-pressure situations.
• Strong attention to detail.
• Good communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to explain infrastructure risks and recommendations in practical business terms.
• Previous experience supporting SAP environments.
• Experience working with infrastructure hosting or supporting SAP application and database workloads.
• Experience with Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code tooling.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with centralised logging and observability platforms.
• Experience with vulnerability management and security tooling.
• Experience administering Redis or similar caching technologies.
• Experience with highly available ecommerce or customer-facing infrastructure.
• Experience supporting infrastructure across multiple physical locations or datacentres.
• Experience working in organisations subject to formal audit, governance or listed-company control requirements.
• Familiarity with broader Microsoft infrastructure and enterprise systems.

Responsibilities:

• Administer, maintain and improve Linux and Microsoft server environments.
• Provision and configure new virtual machines, servers, services and supporting infrastructure.
• Deploy and configure applications and infrastructure components.
• Monitor the health, performance, availability and security of production and internal systems.
• Investigate and resolve infrastructure incidents, performance issues and system failures.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting and logging for new and existing systems.
• Manage and improve configuration automation using Ansible.
• Support and administer containerised environments using Docker, CRI-O and Kubernetes.
• Manage Kubernetes clusters, workloads, services and associated infrastructure.
• Administer and provide operational support for MySQL, Galera Cluster and Microsoft SQL Server environments.
• Build, maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines.
• Support software deployment and release processes in collaboration with the Development Team.
• Maintain system patching, upgrades, security configuration and vulnerability remediation.
• Manage backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes.
• Improve infrastructure resilience and reduce key-person dependencies through documentation and cross-training.
• Review existing infrastructure and recommend improvements where systems can be made more reliable, secure, maintainable or efficient.
• Support infrastructure-related security incidents and remediation activities.
• Maintain clear technical documentation covering systems, infrastructure, recovery procedures and operational processes.
• Work with third-party infrastructure and technology partners where specialist support is required.
• Support the broader IT function where infrastructure, systems or operational responsibilities overlap.

Technologies:

• Ansible
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Docker
• Git
• HTTP
• Support
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Load Balancing
• MySQL
• Network
• Nginx
• Redis
• SAP
• SQL
• Security
• TCP/IP
• Terraform
• Web
• Windows

More:

We are seeking a Senior DevOps & Systems Engineer to take a hands-on senior role supporting our infrastructure estate across Linux and Microsoft environments. This role is based at our Head Office in Blackburn, with 1 or 2 days a week expected on site, and offers a salary of £60k-£65k. We work closely with our Software Development Team, IT Operations and selected third-party technology partners to support business-critical infrastructure, development environments, databases, container platforms and deployment pipelines. Alongside day-to-day operations, we are focused on improving automation, monitoring, resilience, documentation and disaster recovery across our wider IT estate.

last updated 38 week of 2026