Cloud Solutions Architect

What You'll Do...

You’ll be working alongside our incredibly talented cloud engineers and client success managers, as we help accelerate our clients’ success in the digital economy.

You will be working with our Digital Business clients who are tech-centric businesses actively developing the software that is critical to their existence in the world. These businesses might be established digital-natives, ISVs providing specialist enterprise software; or exciting FinTechs in the early stages of growth. Whatever their industry or profile, technology is fundamental to the way they create value and you’ll be helping accelerate their capabilities.

Drawing on your broad knowledge of DevOps, IT Operations, and Cloud Technologies you will help our clients create and implement new strategic capabilities. We are an AWS Advanced Consulting partner and aligned to the Well-Architected programme and migration frameworks so you’ll work extensively within these processes and best-practice frameworks.

Depending on the maturity of the clients’ Cloud and DevOps adoption you will be involved in some or all stages of cloud adoption and modernisation, and will be able to guide them through each stage.

You’ll also have plenty of opportunities and support to share your thoughts internally and externally by participating in meetups, blogging, social media etc.

Here’s how your first month will look…

• Our People Team have provided you with everything you need to know during your induction
• You are now using the laptop, kit and setup of your choice
• You’ll dive straight into your squad’s stand-ups
• You’ll join many Zoom calls with both prospective and existing customers; shadowing the engineers, consultants and CSMs in your squad to understand our approach to presales, discovery, architecture, delivery, operations and governance
• Your teammates will have bought you up to speed with their in-flight client work, and you’ll get under the skin of the technology and architectural choices they’ve made
• We’ll introduce your squad’s strategy and you’ll start to see how you can contribute, beyond your client work, to moving us forward as a business
• You’ll attend your first (virtual) DevOpsGroup Conference and, like all good conferences, you are now the proud owner of plenty DevOpsGroup branded SWAG
• As a new starter, the access to our knowledge base and support systems is coming in real handy
• Any queries or concerns? These have been addressed and you’re more than ready for your DevOpsGroup future

By month three…

• You’ve continued pairing with others in your squad and you’re now working independently on areas you are more familiar with
• You’ve had several opportunities to influence technology and architecture choices for some very exciting tech and digital businesses
• You are starting to deliver exciting work for our clients, and you’ll have seen projects that you helped shape progress into delivery
• As you have full access to our DevOpsGroup Academy, you’ve probably completed some further certifications, such as the Agile and DevOps foundation and could be looking to further your AWS or other technical certifications
• Perhaps you’ve got a thing or two wrong along the way, failure is an option at DevOpsGroup and is something we are always learning from
• You may have planned how you’ll be spending your training budget
• You are now familiar with every member of the DevOpsGroup family

A full year with DevOpsGroup…

• You’ve added significant value to our client experience, travelled to plenty of client sites now and familiar with the extended team
• You’ve shaped several successful cloud migrations and overcome some personal milestones of your own on the way
• You’ve designed a handful of leading-edge cloud-native platforms that have accelerated our clients development
• Whether it’s stage or screen, the platform is yours and you may be reflecting back on some epic uses of it
• You know what is required of you to achieve the next grade in your career here

Meet the Chimera Squad

Bob Larkin

Lead Engineer

We’re looking for someone who…

• Is an experienced AWS architect with multiple AWS Certifications (ideally including AWS Solution Architect Professional certificate attained or renewed within the last year)
• Loves problem solving and is naturally inquisitive
• Has excellent written and verbal communication skills across all technical levels
• Understands how to persuade and influence people at all levels within IT
• Is able to provide technical guidance and mentoring to the team, and our customers
• Learns rapidly and loves to develop their skills
• Is excellent at sharing knowledge and explaining technical concept

The experience you’ll need…

Essential:

• Deep knowledge and understanding of AWS’s core infrastructure and platform services including container orchestrators.
• Understanding and applied knowledge from the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Experience working on architecting solutions for cloud-based deployments
• Deep understanding of the values and principles of Agile software development with experience working with a team / teams that have practiced Agile delivery
• The ability to communicate and work well with development and operations teams
• The ability to write reports, presentations and business cases for clients, with good written, verbal and financial reasoning.
• Background knowledge of how traditional deployments work, including physical datacentres, virtualisation, networking and storage.
• Ability to work alongside client success managers and engineers to manage multiple stakeholders and balance priorities and the team.
• Must be comfortable working with multiple clients in any given week
• A strong appreciation of Operability concepts with a ‘design for operations’ approach and mind-set
• The ability to make well-reasoned recommendations for a client, using requirements and existing knowledge, and to defend those recommendations.
• Confident in running workshops with clients and presenting using a wide range of tooling, both virtually and in-person.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to different levels of a client’s company, from engineers to C-level people
• An understanding of technologies that underpin a DevOps approach to cloud migration and management, including but not exclusive to, Hashicorp Stack (especially Terraform) and CloudFormation/ARM templates

Desirable:

• AWS Solution Architect Professional certification (ideally attained or renewed within the last year)
• A background working for managed service providers or consultancy service providers
• Experience with large scale migrations to the cloud; bonus marks for experience with cloud to cloud migrations
• Experience of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments
• A high-level knowledge of Azure, GCP and potentially other cloud platforms, with the ability to draw comparisons between the platforms and make recommendations on platform choice for a customer’s use case.
• A detailed working knowledge of Azure, with the ability to work fully across both AWS and Azure
• The ability to take on engineering work from time to time, helping translate your architectures into PoCs or even into production.
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible
• Experience with pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, CodePipeline, Azure DevOps and CircleCI
• Experience with both relational and non-relational databases, such as MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB and CosmosDB
• Experience with programming languages, such as Python, Go, .NET and Java

Please note: To protect our staff and candidates during the Covid-19 Pandemic and keep everyone safe, interview stages will be conducted remotely, via Telephone and Zoom. We are a collaborative bunch and embrace the necessary tools available, to ensure the process is as flexible and smooth as possible during this time.

We are committed to equality of opportunity for all staff and applications from individuals are encouraged regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.