Cloud Engineer

Excellent opportunity for a Cloud Engineer to join our Cloud Platform Team here at Admiral Group Plc.

The Cloud Engineers work closely with other Delivery teams to realise Admiral’s ambitious cloud transformation.  You should be highly proficient in infrastructure as code and using automation techniques and tools. You’ll be responsible for designing, planning, building, and running secure cloud infrastructure.

The Team

The Cloud Platform Team is tasked with delivering the core cloud platform on which all our cloud services will run. The team is made up of cloud engineers with a variety of backgrounds in infrastructure, networking, operations, and development. Admiral is making a big investment in cloud in the coming years and this team continues to be crucial to the success of that strategy. We’ve launched our first live apps 2021 and recently deployed one of Admiral’s critical systems in Azure as well as expanding our use of GCP. In 2023 there will be a programme of work to migrate existing on-premises workloads to the cloud.

The Role

• Design, develop, and maintain secure scalable and automated services
• Collaborate to define best practices and standards around DevOps and service resilience
• Create reusable automation libraries that can be applied across the company
• Deliver on HA/DR, security, capacity, and compliance strategies for existing and new applications
• Develop usage standards, user self-service designs, and reporting on application KPIs
• 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
• Collaborate with and provide expertise/guidance to other teams inside and outside of IT
• Collaborate with Information Security to ensure infrastructure is deployed in accordance with security standards and policies

Skills required

Essential Skills

• Experience of design and implementation of Azure infrastructure, applications and cloud solutions at enterprise level and scale
• Strong hands-on experience of Azure PaaS and SaaS solutions, particularly AKS, Application Gateway and API Management
• Deploying automation and configuration using pipeline Azure DevOps
• Strong experience deploying infrastructure as code using Terraform
• Experience with secure configuration best practices and the hardening of critical systems

Desirable skills

• Experience as a SysOps/Linux or Windows Systems Administrator and systems designer
• Experience of design and implementation of infrastructure, applications, and cloud solutions at enterprise level
• Understanding of Azure Resource Manager, Ansible, Terraform, and other engineering tools
• Strong scripting and coding using Python, Ruby, and Bash
• In-depth understanding of networking security concepts, such as IP subnets, NACLs, NSGs, routing, firewalls:
  • Cloud networking
  • Palo Alto firewalls
  • Prisma Cloud
  • Microsoft Defender
• Broad systems and infrastructure knowledge and CI/CD tools:
  • Azure DevOps, Twistlock, Sonarqube, Nexus
  • Containerisation using Docker, Kubernetes, or Openshift
• Strong automation skills
• Working in a cross-functional DevOps team
• Experience with datacentre migration, cloud migration, integration, and consolidation efforts
• Hands on exposure to cloud and automation technologies
• Help define, build, and maintain secure infrastructure, services and processes that accelerate our cloud strategy
• Evangelise topics such as monitoring, performance, security 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
• Familiarity with the concept of 'infrastructure as code'
• In-depth understanding of Cloud based architectures, preferably Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google Cloud Platform

Other skills:

• Deals well with ambiguous or undefined problems; ability to think abstractly and guide others
• Can articulate technical topics to non-technical audiences in writing, diagrams, and person
• Has demonstrable knowledge of DevOps in an Enterprise setting, both on public cloud (Azure) and on-premises
• Is an energetic team player who works well across boundaries and readily adapts to change and enjoys rapid development
• Is a security champion and is experienced with protecting data, applications, and networks in the cloud

Experience Required

• Experience as an IT Infrastructure Engineer, with focus on cloud, server, storage, and networking
• Current experience of Azure platform
• Strong understanding of cloud services & APIs and with experience in designing and moving workloads to public clouds. Good knowledge on secure cloud services.
• Strong understanding of cloud computing technologies, security, business drivers, and emerging computing trends
• Experience in using automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible
• Strong troubleshooting skills
• Used to working in a financial services or highly regulated environment.
• Own and develop the customer layer of the architecture repository

Interview Process

There will be a 2 stage interview process for this role. The first stage will be an On-line technical assessment and the second stage will be an interview via MS Teams. 

Assessments and interiews will take place throughout January and February.

Our Commitment to You

At Admiral, we are committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. Admiral is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected status.

All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment.

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 the 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.

All colleagues will receive 33 days holiday (including banks holidays) when they join us, and this will increase with length of service, up to a maximum of 38 days (including banks holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to five days of annual leave in addition to your allocation.

You can also view some of our other key benefits here.

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