Lead DevOps Engineer: MES Deployments for Biotech

Cognizant; Limerick; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking a DevOps Lead Engineer to join a greenfield MES rollout at a biotech site in Limerick, Ireland. The ideal candidate will own the DevOps toolchain, design and optimize CI/CD pipelines, and drive infrastructure-as-code, release governance, and automated testing across dev, test, and production environments.

The role requires strong leadership, experience with MES platforms (Emerson Syncade preferred), and familiarity with regulated pharma environments (GxP/CSV/GAMP5).

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience as a DevOps Lead or Senior DevOps Engineer on complex enterprise programmes.
• Strong CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automation and scripting skills.
• Experience managing enterprise environments – release and configuration management; infrastructure provisioning.
• Background supporting MES platforms, ideally Emerson Syncade, across deployment and upgrades.
• Experience in regulated pharma/life sciences environments (GxP/CSV/GAMP5) desirable.
• Familiarity with MES integrations into SAP, LIMS and historian systems; containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong problem-solving, communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Build, implement, and refine CI/CD pipelines across dev, test, and production.
• Own the DevOps toolchain and environment lifecycle: source control, IaC, configuration management, release governance.
• Provision and manage secure, scalable MES infrastructure with high availability.
• Lead MES platform management (Emerson Syncade) including deployments, config, upgrades, and support.
• Set coding standards, branching, and change control for a regulated manufacturing setting.
• Collaborate with software engineering, QA, MES vendors, SI partners and business stakeholders.
• Implement automated testing and quality gates in CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish monitoring, logging and alerting to ensure platform health.
• Document deployment records for CSV, audit readiness and business continuity.
• Drive continuous improvement and remove deployment bottlenecks with measurable metrics.
• Serve as technical authority for complex infrastructure and deployments.

Skills

DevOps Leadership

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Automation

Scripting

Release Management

Configuration Management

Regulated Environments

MES Integrations

Stakeholder Management

GxP/CSV/GAMP5

Docker

Kubernetes

Emerson Syncade

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Cognizant is seeking a DevOps Lead Engineer to join a greenfield MES rollout at a biotech site in Limerick, Ireland. The ideal candidate will own the DevOps toolchain, design and optimize CI/CD pipelines, and drive infrastructure-as-code, release governance, and automated testing across dev, test, and production environments.

The role requires strong leadership, experience with MES platforms (Emerson Syncade preferred), and familiarity with regulated pharma environments (GxP/CSV/GAMP5).