Principal DevOps Engineer

Job summary

Intermedia is seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to act as a technical lead and architect for infrastructure, automation, and deployments. This role involves defining standards, leading complex initiatives across Windows/Linux platforms with deep expertise in Windows clustering, and owning end-to-end reliability from Infrastructure as Code to release engineering and observability. The position is primarily remote but requires occasional visits to the Bristol or London office.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 7+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering, including leadership in complex environments.
• Expert-level experience designing and operating Windows Server HA and clustering (Failover Clustering and related components).
• Strong Linux administration and automation experience (systemd, networking, storage, performance).
• Advanced skills with Terraform and Ansible (architecture, reusable components, secure operations).
• Strong deployment/release engineering experience with Octopus Deploy and GitHub (release governance, environment promotion, rollback).
• Monitoring/observability expertise with VictoriaMetrics and/or Prometheus (alerting strategy, metrics design, operational readiness).
• Production experience running Redis, RabbitMQ, Nginx (HA, tuning, troubleshooting).
• Strong understanding of networking and security fundamentals (TLS, DNS, load balancing, firewalling, least privilege).
• Proven ability to lead cross-team initiatives, make architectural decisions, and communicate clearly.
• Experience with Kubernetes and container ecosystems (Docker, Helm).

Responsibilities

• Act as technical lead for DevOps, Platform, and Release engineering, setting direction, standards, and best practices.
• Architect and govern end-to-end delivery, including infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, CI/CD, release processes, and operations.
• Design and support Windows-based high availability solutions, with deep ownership of Windows clustering (failover/HA patterns, maintenance, upgrades, troubleshooting).
• Lead Linux automation and platform standardization (configuration, patching, hardening, performance tuning).
• Own Infrastructure as Code strategy with Terraform (modules, environments, state, governance).
• Own automation strategy with Ansible (reusable roles, inventories, secure secrets handling, idempotency).
• Build and standardize deployments using Octopus Deploy, GitHub, and Ansible (templates, shared steps, release promotion, rollback).
• Design and mature CI/CD pipelines (artifact versioning, approvals, promotion strategy, policy-as-code where applicable).
• Establish observability standards using VictoriaMetrics/Prometheus (metrics strategy, alerting, SLO/SLA monitoring, dashboards).
• Provide production leadership: incident response, RCA/postmortems, reliability improvements, capacity planning.
• Mentor engineers, review designs/code, and raise overall engineering quality across teams.
• Produce and maintain architecture documentation, runbooks, and platform roadmaps.

Skills

Degrees

Relocation