Senior DevOps Engineer 

Job Title: Senior DevOps Engineer

Location:Oxford, Hybrid.

Reporting to: Head of Data Engineering

Contract Type: Permanent

We have a legal responsibility to ensure that you have the right to work in the UK before you can start working for us, we are unable to offer sponsorship at this time.

Please submit your CV and cover letter to by26th February 2025. Due to the high volume of applications, we are only able to respond to those selected for interview. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process, please do let us know so we can make suitable arrangements for you

Who we are

Akrivia Health are global leaders in the application of real-world data & evidence for mental health and dementias, providing valuable insights for research. With the largest and richest repository of real-world data in the world, we enable our clients and collaborators to accelerate clinical trials and to identify, develop and deliver effective new drugs, devices and services to patients and caregivers. We provide our research support and data curation services to the NHS for free, in order to support mental health provision, service improvement and improved patient outcomes across our network. Our Precision Neuroscience Initiative – GlobalMinds – is creating the UK’s largest biobank of patients with mental health conditions to transform research and alleviate disease burden in this area of critical unmet medical needs.

Duties & Responsibilities

We are seeking an experienced DevOps Engineer to take on a leadership role within our DevOps team, driving technical excellence and infrastructure optimisation. You will be responsible for the architecture, costing, management, and scaling of our AWS-based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stack, while supporting our AI and data engineering teams in building NLP and ETL pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

·      Technical Leadership: Lead DevOps projects, provide guidance to junior engineers, and establish best practices to streamline deployment, automation, and infrastructure management processes.

·      Cloud Infrastructure: Architect, implement, and optimise AWS infrastructure for performance, scalability, and security.

·      Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use Terraform to manage infrastructure provisioning and version control, ensuring compliance and repeatability.

·      CI/CD Automation: Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines, to ensure robust integration testing on our committed code and efficient deployments.

·      Containerization & Orchestration: Build, manage, and optimise Docker containers for our services and Kubernetes clusters to support services architecture.

·      Observability: Implement monitoring and logging solutions using Grafana, Loki, and other tools to enhance visibility, alerting, and troubleshooting.

·      Scripting & Automation: Leverage Python and Bash scripting to automate processes, configurations, and infrastructure management.

·      Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with AI engineers to support NLP pipeline development and data engineers to streamline ETL workflows, ensuring infrastructure supports data and machine learning requirements.

·      Documentation & Compliance: Create and maintain clear documentation on DevOps practices, infrastructure, and workflows, championing transparency and continuous improvement.

·      Cost Reviews: Perform monthly cost reviews on our AWS infrastructure working across the team to remove obsolete services & suggesting optimizations and savings plans where appropriate

Essential:

·      Experience: 5+ years in a DevOps or similar role with extensive experience managing AWS-based infrastructures

·      Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency in Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and declarative, versioned infrastructure management. Hands on experience reverse engineering existing infrastructure to terraform

·      Kubernetes: 5+ years provisioning & maintaining Kubernetes clusters with hands on experience deploying Airflow, Spark & Kafka across multiple node-pools along with managing update schedules across production environments. Experience with both Helm and Kustomize for templating deployments

·      AWS: Solid understanding of AWS services (e.g., EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, Lambda, ECS/EKS).

·      CI/CD: Experience with tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD for setting up and optimizing CI/CD pipelines.

·      Containerization & Orchestration: Advanced knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for managing and scaling applications.

·      Observability: Proficiency with DataDog, Grafana, Loki, and other tools for monitoring and logging.

·      Scripting: Strong skills in Python & Bash for managing infrastructure and workflow automation

·      Leadership: Proven experience in leading technical projects and mentoring team members.

·      Collaboration: Effective communication skills, with a record of working cross-functionally with AI and data engineering teams.

·      Problem-solving: Excellent troubleshooting skills and a proactive problem-solving mindset.

·      Single Sign-On (SSO): Experience managing Single Sign-On (SSO) systems and supporting secure authentication workflows.

·      Budget conscious: cost cutting mindset & excellent understanding around diagnosing resource overprovision to ensure cloud costs remain low

Desirable:

·      Familiarity with Azure-infrastructure product suite as part of our multi-cloud strategy

·      Familiarity with other integration tools like Azure DevOps

·      Familiarity with Windows Active Directory management and administration.

·      Knowledge of machine learning operations (MLOps) for supporting AI/ML workflows and deployments.

Our Culture

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic and friendly team who are passionate about making positive changes in people’s lives. At Akrivia Health, our culture is one of integrity, respect, collaboration and trust.

Benefits:

·      Competitive salary package, depending on skills and experience.

·      Pension scheme with the opportunity to receive employer contributions.

·      25 days annual leave, plus the bank holidays (+3days after 3 years).

·      Health insurance package after probation completion.

·      Fantastic learning and development opportunities, including an annual training budget.

·      Hybrid working – minimum 2 days per week in offices in Oxford & London.

Our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion

At Akrivia Health we understand that a diversity of perspectives not only fosters innovation, creativity and learning, but is also crucial for understanding and addressing the challenges in mental health and dementia.We are a committed equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, disability or background.  

To find out more about us please visit: https://akriviahealth.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Akrivia Health

Changing the trajectory of research within neuroscience