DevOps Engineer (IT) / Contractor

Role: DevOps Engineer Role Type: Manchester - UK - Hybrid (2 Days on-site) Salary/ Rate: Negotiable Type: Contract Inside IR35 About The Client Project The Core Banking Platform is responsible for the systems that process payments, manage accounts, and deliver essential banking functionality. We serve all areas of the Bank that consume transactional data from our Core Banking Systems—supporting colleague and customer journeys, regulatory reporting, and real-time event streaming. Our platform is moving towards a modern, event-driven architecture, leveraging APIs, cloud-native services, and advanced DevOps tooling to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing solutions. We work closely with partners across the Group, including Data & Machine Learning, Consumer Lending, and Cloud Services, to deliver strategic account data products and enable the next generation of banking services. We’re committed to continuous improvement, modernizing our tooling (e.g., migrating from Jenkins to Harness for CI/CD, enabling blue-green deployments, and adoption of backstage as the Internal Developer Portal) and ensuring our engineers have the skills and support to deliver at pace and scale. About The Role As a DevOps Engineer in Core Banking, you’ll play a pivotal role in designing, building, and supporting the tools and processes that enable our teams to deliver high-quality software at pace. You’ll work collaboratively across engineering, product, and operations teams to ensure our platform is secure, resilient, and continuously improving. What You’ll Do • Design, implementation, and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines using industry-standard tools (e.g., Jenkins, Harness Git, Nexus, SonarQube, Docker, Kubernetes). • Champion DevOps best practices, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated testing, monitoring, and observability, ensuring compliance with banking regulations and internal security standards. • Support the deployment and operation of microservices on both private and public cloud environments, leveraging container orchestration (Kubernetes) and service mesh (Istio) where appropriate. • Drive continuous improvement by identifying bottlenecks, automating manual processes, and sharing knowledge across engineering teams. • Ensure robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes are in place to maintain high availability and reliability of banking services. What We’re Looking For • Strong engineering background with a deep understanding of DevOps practices, processes, and supporting tools. • Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines and associated DevOps tooling (Jenkins, Harness, Backstage, Git, Nexus, SonarQube, Docker, Kubernetes). • Proficiency with source control systems (Git), including branching strategies and code review practices. • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (especially GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, and Infrastructure as Code. • Familiarity with monitoring, logging, alerting, and SRE concepts (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.). • Experience with test automation tools (JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Postman). • Knowledge of messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka) and service mesh (Istio). • Understanding of network protocols, security best practices, and compliance requirements for banking. • Curiosity, adaptability, and a commitment to continuous improvement and inclusive teamwork. • Experience with network protocols & security. • Exposure to large-scale, regulated environments (preferably financial services). • Knowledge of additional DevOps tools and emerging technologies. Candidate Profile What we’re looking for: • Strong engineering background with a deep understanding of DevOps practices, processes, and supporting tools. • Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines and associated DevOps tooling (Jenkins, Harness, Backstage, Git, Nexus, SonarQube, Docker, Kubernetes). • Proficiency with source control systems (Git), including branching strategies and code review practices. • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (especially GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, and Infrastructure as Code. • Familiarity with monitoring, logging, alerting, and SRE concepts (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.). • Experience with test automation tools (JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Postman). • Knowledge of messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka) and service mesh (Istio). • Understanding of network protocols, security best practices, and compliance requirements for banking. • Curiosity, adaptability, and a commitment to continuous improvement and inclusive teamwork. • Experience with network protocols & security. • Exposure to large-scale, regulated environments (preferably financial services). • Knowledge of additional DevOps tools and emerging technologies.