Job title
Lead Platform (DevOps) Engineer

Location
Kings Hill (Kent), near West Malling, Kent

Department
Technology


Who are RDT?
RDT is a focused and successful agile software company. It has been working in the UK insurance market for over 20 year and in this time has been delivering highly innovative software and consulting solutions. RDT prides itself on being a disruptive force in the insurance market and has been at the forefront of many pivotal technology innovations. This is still true today, as we continue to build industry changing products in our singular quest to ReDefine Tomorrow. To find out more about us and what we do click here www.rdt.co.uk.

As part of RDT’s ongoing commitment to hiring the best people for every vacancy we have, we recognise that sometimes we need to be flexible and consider the particular needs of each applicant. If you think your skills and experience might match this role but need to work in a particular way; different hours or more flexibly – don’t not apply, give us a chance to see if we can match what you need before you count us out of your job search.


The Lead Platform Engineer role at RDT
The Lead Platform Engineer role is at its heart a DevOps role but with a wide reach and proactive approach.

RDT is a Lean Software Engineering organisation and as such we focus on the key elements of delivery that make us highly efficient such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and build and deployment automation. Unlike traditional Software houses we don’t just do this internally, but bake it into our products to ensure that we provide our customers with our tools and experience also.

As part of the Technology stream, that also includes Architecture, the Lead Platform Engineer is a key role to shape, guide and implement the right platform for our products and teams. The role focuses on designing, building and supporting the RDT delivery teams to efficiently meet the needs of the business and our clients along with driving innovation, consistency and efficiency in our software.

The Lead Platform Engineer will be working closely with the Delivery Platform Owner, in order to help drive change and efficiencies across the RDT Delivery Platform. A critical part of this role will be enabling the flow of work from design through to completion with the rest of the platform engineering team.

The Lead Platform Engineer will need to support and influence key stakeholders, such as product owners, developers and operational teams to ensure our product and architecture strategies are understood, supported and ultimately delivered.

What does this job involve?
The role will therefore have the following responsibilities:
• Provide Technical Leadership to delivery teams as well as the Platform Engineering team to maintain and embed an organisational DevOps culture.
• Strong stakeholder engagement in the enhancement and roadmap priorities of the delivery platform to the Delivery Platform Owner
• Design and implement industry best-practise for automated configuration, management and security
• Driving the platform engineering team planning and work activities
• Partner with delivery teams to define and develop operationally sustainable CI/CD solutions
• Manage Core development and delivery systems such as Azure DevOps
• Report on Key platform metrics and identify improvements
• Automate operations tasks to minimize manual steps to enable continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Participate in problem solving and troubleshooting for the assigned applications, functional areas or projects
• Design and maintain monitoring, measuring and alerting systems


What we need from you

Minimum
• 5+ years experience as a DevOps engineer
• Demonstrable experience in designing CI/CD solutions that meet business and stakeholder requirements.
• Proven Technical leadership skills
• Strong technical knowledge of Microsoft Azure, across both IaaS and Serverless options.
• In depth knowledge of Azure DevOps across all aspects.
• Detailed knowledge of CI and CD recommended practices
• Knowledge of .NET ecosystem, build and release tools
• Excellent verbal, written and design communication skills.
• Experience with Windows operating system, networking and information security.

Essential
• Strong technical knowledge of Azure Deployment methods, such as Terraform, ARM, Azure CLI.
• Strong programming and scripting capabilities in Powershell and Powershell DSC.
• Design and Implementation experience with artefact repositories (NuGet, MyGet, Bower, NPM, Azure Artefacts).
• Experience with provisioning tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible
• Substantial business experience in delivering projects through to a successful completion
• Physical & virtual server hardware, OS platforms, tool selection (VMware, containers).
• Strong experience of container virtualization and orchestration layers, like Docker and Service Fabric
• Knowledge of Distributed Systems and Micro Service Architectures.
• Proven experience of operation inside a team within a leadership capacity

Desired
• Demonstrable line management experience of functional teams
• Experience of deploying and supporting Service Fabric Applications
• Experience configuring centralized logging and application monitoring
• Excellent RDBMS and SQL knowledge and experience
• Active Directory, Certificate services, DNS, DHCP


General Skills
• Affinity for change. The ability to identify opportunities and lead others through organisational and technology change.
• Ability to work with imperfect information in the environment of uncertainty whilst still maintaining high standard, evidenced designs and documentation.
• Strong risk management skills to manage risk through the project lifecycle.
• Ability to multi-task to lead platform engineering on multiple projects.
• Good level of commercial awareness, the ability to understand client propositions and promote cost effective solutions.
• Ability to work to tight deadlines.
• Reliable, determined, highly motivated & proactive.
• Strong technical team leadership, alongside the ability and tolerance to work with others. Communication is a key element within platform engineering.
• Can demonstrate innovative, dynamic and creative approach to problem-solving.
• Ability to work at all levels of design conceptually, logically and physically when required.
• Proactive and leading by example; hands on, involved in all tasks and taking on sprint backlog items when required.
• Good prioritisation skills.

Business acumen
• Experience of stakeholder management at all levels; both internally and externally with excellent influencing skills.
• Demonstrate substantial experience in applying engineering principles to effect changes to business and technical environments.
• Customer liaison skillsets, consulting both internal and external parties to arrive at an appropriate recommended solution.
• Ability to grasp issues of a business nature and explain technical issues in business or technical language.
• Familiarity with, or ability to quickly grasp, the business drivers of our product strategy.
• Sound commercial approach to identifying solutions.
• A good understanding of the Insurance Industry would be a bonus but is not a pre-requisite.
• Ability to work with others to deliver continuous improvement.


What’s in it for you?
You will have the opportunity to shape the RDT delivery platform and its evolvement as RDT continue with new products. This in turn will heavily influence our strategic technical and business direction and success. You will be working with sharp and innovative people who are dedicated and driven and more than happy to share their knowledge with you. You will be expected to be the best you can be and encouraged and supported to achieve this.



Apply now!