Lead DevOps Engineer

Rate - £550 (A day)

Location - London (Hybrid)

Duration - 6 months (Initially)

IR35 - Inside (Must use an umbrella company)

Running our IT production services and supporting the software development life cycle.

As the senior application Support Engineer, you'll take ownership of our applications including Clipper and Microsoft Dynamics CRM (our case handling systems), Kofax (our scanning solution), Microsoft SharePoint (for our electronic case file handling) and FOS Messaging (our message based enterprise bus).

You'll manage the change pipeline, constantly striving to improve the throughput whilst balancing the risk to our live operational systems. You'll design, build and provide support to the Back End of our applications, maximising their uptime, ensuring efficient use of resources whilst mitigating risks and containing issues.

You will be a subject matter expert for all operational aspects of our case handling systems, lead and coach other members of the team and share your expertise with others within IT.

you're accountable for

• deploying a variety of IT solutions to a range of environments - you'll be Scripting and automating our processes
• making decisions and balancing the risk with successfully deploying changes, and deciding on the best course of action in resolving technical problems
• conducting technical troubleshooting activities in a range of systems and technologies
• growing the team's capability through new working practices, introducing new tools and processes - and coaching your colleagues
• ensuring the smooth running of our applications across a range of Servers and environments
• liaising with technical experts on issues that may arise - you'll be escalating tasks to the relevant colleagues in IT, and communicating about technical problems and possible solutions
• updating the release manager and other stakeholders with the technical progress on projects
• updating the service desk and Supportworks with details on how we've gone about dealing with support calls and building a sharable knowledgebase
• improving the change pipeline including the full continuous delivery (CD) and continuous change (CC) processes, ensuring everything is as efficient as possibly
• planning for the future from capacity to stability to continuously improving methods to automate, ensure consistency and improve the up-time of our systems - you'll be planning a work schedule up to around four months ahead
• maintaining collaborative working relationships with suppliers and colleagues in infrastructure, software development and projects
• delivering on your own objectives in line with our values - and working collectively with the IT team to contribute to our commitments as a whole
• making sure we're delivering a fair and efficient service, that reflects the diversity of our customers and our people, through everything we do

your experience includes

• having solid technical experience in a development and operational environment using Microsoft tools
• programming in languages such as C# and Scripting with powershell
• having experience building CC and CD using tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Team City and Octopus
• having strong testing knowledge and approaches from automated testing, test-driven development to testing non-functional requirements and operational acceptance
• working within Agile teams with Scrum and Kanban approaches
• being a role model and developing other colleagues' capabilities through coaching
• having an indepth knowledge of SQL or Microsoft SQL Server would be desirable
• being able to effectively deploy and support .NET applications would be desirable
• having in-depth knowledge of web hosting, load balancing and networking
• having some knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and how to support it effectively would be desirable
• having strong attention to detail, being thorough and methodical in your approach
• having strong organisational and planning skills - you'll be working in a structured way to make sure your deadlines are met
• being a fast learner who's able to quickly grasp new IT concepts and be accountable for them
• having good communication skills - you'll be explaining technical concepts and issues to a variety of colleagues
• having a strong customer service ethic and being able to keep internal customers happy
• having experience of working in an IT team that's supporting a virtualised technical on premise environment would be desirable
• having experience of Azure and other cloud platforms and a range XaaS's with integration with on premise solutions would be desirable