Virtualisation and Cloud Engineer

We are looking for an experienced Infrastructure and DevOps engineer to join our Platform Services Team.  You will be working closely with other support teams to realise Admiral’s ambitious cloud journey.  You should be proficient in infrastructure as code and using automation techniques and tools. You will be involved in the designing and planning phases and then responsible for building and maintaining the cloud infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is in place you will assist and enable various teams with migrating services from on prem datacentres to the cloud, along with ensuring that the on-premise estate is still maintained and performing to a high standard.

The Team

The Platform services Team is tasked with supporting the backend physical servers, hyper-visors and operating systems of the on-premise server estate whilst delivering new or replacement solutions in the cloud. The team also assist with migrating and transforming current on-prem services to the cloud.  The team is made up of compute engineers with a variety of backgrounds in infrastructure, Windows and Linux OS support. Admiral is making a large investment in cloud in the coming years and this team will be crucial to the success of that strategy.

Main Duties

• Provision and maintain cloud infrastructure.
• Assist with maintain on prem infrastructure.
• Driving increased automation and efficiencies on both on-premise and cloud estate.
• Collaborate with and provide expertise/guidance to other teams inside and outside of IT.
• Collaborate to define best practices and standards around DevOps.
• Implement and maintain HA/DR, security, capacity, resilience, and compliance strategies for existing and new applications.
• Optimize and support our existing public cloud-based solutions and workloads.
• Work with architecture team to ensure effective designs and application of the cloud and hosting services, aligned to architecture patterns and archetypes.

In addition to this you will also proactively manage and address any risk issues relating to your assigned duties. You will be expected to complete your duties whilst conforming to any project timelines or service level agreements that are in place.

This is not a full definition of the role but covers the main aspects and drivers for success.

Behavioural Competencies

• Analytical mindset and ensure decisions are objectively justified.
• Understanding of the impact of decisions for the team and the business. 
• Listens to others and accepts input from colleagues.
• Clear articulation of ideas and thoughts verbally.
• Readily be available to help support the team and the wider Admiral IT.
• Contributes to a positive and harmonious team atmosphere.
• Maintain a good working relationship with customers and technical partners. 
• Show passion for your work and a commitment to succeed.
• Proactively seeking to improve knowledge. 
• Willing to work with structured frameworks, methodologies, and best practices.
• Focus on providing solutions to problems.
• Focus on solving problems in a logical step-by-step way. 
• Be prepared to challenge the status quo and make suggestions for areas of quality improvement.
• Be willing to voice an opinion on all matters whilst being receptive to feedback.

Essential Skills

• Enterprise level experience of designing and implementation solutions on Azure.
• Strong hands-on experience of migrating or transforming operational services into cloud.
• Deploying automation and configuration using pipeline Azure DevOps.
• Strong experience deploying infrastructure as code using Terraform.

Desirable skills

• Experience as a Linux or Windows Systems Administrator and systems designer
• Experience of design and implementation of infrastructure, applications and cloud solutions at enterprise level
• Strong automation skills with Terraform and Ansible.
• Containerisation using Docker, Kubernetes, or Openshift
• Code management and deployment using Git and Azure DevOps or similar
• Evangelise topics such as monitoring, performance, and reliability throughout our IT support and delivery teams.
• Advise application teams to design highly available services.
• Help define and document infrastructure standards for existing IT teams to follow.
• In-depth understanding of Cloud based architectures, preferably Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Experience Required

• 3+ years professional experience working on large, mixed-technology, multi-site server environments with a strong focus on cloud.
• Current experience of Azure.
• Practical experience in the following areas:
  • Creating Low-level design documents
  • Server Automation
  • Cloud migration
  • Server performance monitoring and tuning.
  • Scripting skills Ansible, Terraform and ideally powershell.
  • Containerisation eg Kubernetes , Docker, GKE, AKS. 
• Practical experience using Server and Virtualisation technologies including:
  • VMWare ESXi, vSAN, vCenter 
• Require: Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate certification or higher
• Considered: Other Azure, GCP, AWS, VCP, RHCSA or RHCE certifications.

*Feedback and interviews for this role will begin on 29/03/2022*

Why work for us?

Admiral has many benefits but further to that you will also benefit from:

• Working with a top-class team
• Working on exciting challenges to maintain Admiral’s competitive advantage
• Playing a central role in shaping and enabling Admiral's digital ambitions
• Be given the flexibility to work in the way that allows you to give your best
• Work in an open and accessible department
• Know that you are working for a department who regularly take part in charitable events

Salary, Benefits and Work-Life Balance

We do not have a set salary for this position, as it will be dependent on the successful candidate’s experience. We are happy to see CVs from all candidates who meet the requirements and will be happy to discuss the remuneration package.

At Admiral, we are proud to be a diverse business where we put our people and customers first. We have great benefits to ensure employees have a great work-life balance; it's one of the reasons we're consistently voted one of Sunday Times Best Big Companies to Work For in the UK. We want you to have an element of freedom to define a working lifestyle that supports this, so accommodate flexible hours wherever possible.

You can also view some of our other key benefits here; https://admiraljobs.co.uk/employee-benefits/.

#LI-CC1