Senior DevOps Engineer

Technology. Award-winning customer service. Bleeding-edge data ability.

Simply Business is a new type of insurance company, using all of the above  to create the best possible insurance experience for small businesses and self-employed people.

We love working here, and have even taken the number one spot in the  Sunday Times Best Company To Work For 2015 and 16 lists; we’ve stopped entering now to focus on a few bigger projects, but you get the idea.

It’s a great place towork.

There are currently over 400,000 active Simply Business insurance policies in the UK alone. And we have offices in London, Northampton and Boston,USA.

Talking of offices, ours are bright, airy and geared up for really smart  working. We’re flexible, with plenty of remote workers coming in and out,  and we believe work and life should be hand in hand, rather than a juggling  act. So no need to worry about school pick-ups, or a horrible commute.

Our people are our most important asset, so we focus on building a working  life that helps us thrive, not stick. Join us and you’ll be part of our journey  to creating something even better, for our customers and ourselves.

You will help bring us closer to our DevOps nirvana and contribute to our Platform as a Service and DevOps culture (test driven infrastructure, automate everything, self-service tooling).

We are product driven, not project driven. Our PaaS built on cloud infrastructure is our product and the rest of the business our customers.

You will be hands on in creating solutions to build and automate environments for production use. You understand the need to build scalable, auditable, reproducible and usable infrastructure.

You are security minded and endorse chaos engineering along with the approach of “you build it, you run it” and “you break it, you fix it”.

You will be required to be part of the on call rota.

We are 100% hosted at AWS (and attended the most recent re:Invent) and in the middle of working with our product teams to migrate their applications to a Jenkins/Docker/Ansible/CloudFormation driven, region agnostic, blue-green automated deployment pipeline; this offers both AMIs and Docker images for deployment to our respective AWS EC2 and ECS production environment.

In front of this we offer a self-service load balancing solution along with a DSL-based approach for creating and managing our subdomains with regards to DNS, SSL certificates, traffic manager routing and monitoring.

This framework is all done as Infrastructure as Code including integrations of other AWS services (e.g. RDS, S3), with a focus on providing the guardrails for immutable systems and making it as self-service as possible for the Product Teams.

We work in a timely, prioritised and start small manner. We look at the highest pain points for both dev and ops and work backwards. We continuously re-evaluate using the right tool for the DevOps job and making abstraction easy.

To add some flavour, here are a few tasters of current and upcoming workload.....

• Moving our 3TB+ production database to a cloud managed service.
• Launching our Platform as a Service worldwide across any AWS region.
• Migrating our biggest, baddest app to our brand new PaaS.  
• Continuing to iterate on the bootstrapping to get any new application up and running in production.
• Extending our PaaS based on feedback from our Engineer product teams (Lambda? EKS? Fargate?).
• Taking our platform global.

Skills we need......

• Linux systems administration.
• Configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, or any other.
• Experience with continuous delivery / provisioning / deployment.
• Building and managing production public-facing sites.
• Networking skills.
• Familiarity with concepts such as ‘infrastructure as code’ and ‘tools not rules’.
• Strong programming skills (in any language).

Skills we'd like......

• Experience of cloud hosting such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with hosting internet applications - DNS, load balancing, internet protocols, SSL etc...
• Experience of monitoring tools such as Pingdom, New Relic, Threat Stack and Datadog.
• Experience of logging tools such as ELK.
• Experience of SSO tools.
• Experience of simple secrets management.
• Experience of container technologies such as Docker.
• Experience of serverless technologies such as Lambda.
• Experience of TDD.

What are the benefits?

There’s all the serious (but important) stuff we call ‘core benefits’. On top of that, you can pick and choose from the more exciting options we offer – whether it’s a full gym membership or gym subsidy, comprehensive private health cover, extra holiday, or a National Trust pass. 

The ‘core’ stuff

Some of these will kick in once you’re confirmed in post, but here’s the summary:

• a salary that reflects your experience, our pay policy and the market we’re in from your first day, generous annual leave

• life assurance (financial cover for your family, should the worst happen)

• a cash plan to reimburse your everyday medical expenses

• an extra day off if you get married or move house

• an automatic enrollment pension (employer-matched at 5%) 

The fun stuff

Passed probation? Time to pick and mix from things like:

• a full gym membership

• private medical insurance

• extra days annual leave

• shopping vouchers

• dental insurance

• travel insurance

But there’s so much more to Simply Business than insurance and memberships. We also commit to flexible working options, smart working (our offices are kitted out for you to work when and how you choose), cycle to work, eye test vouchers, and season ticket loan schemes, and we have a handy online form to put in any training or conference requests.

Best of all, though, are the groups, clubs, and adventures that come with the Simply Business territory. Forget a simple Give As You Earn scheme (although we’ve got that too) – we trek the Sahara for charity, take you on weekends away, throw epic summer parties, and meet up for book groups, public speaking coaching, yoga, manicures, beer brewing, and lots, lots more.

Our values

Everything we do comes down to these five values – empowerment, authenticity, simplicity, learning and pioneering.

In practice, these will mean something unique to every  person at Simply Business, but if you’re considering working here, give them some thought. They’re at the heart of our story.

Empowerment

We believe in our people and the positive impact they can have so we enable everyone to stretchthemselves

Authenticity

We celebrate diversity, avoid jargon and genuinely care about helping small businesses thrive

Simplicity

We attempt to simplify complex solutions to save our customerstime andeffort

Learning

We’re never done learning about new possibilities and act to explore them

Pioneering

We’re obsessed with finding new ways to create even better  experiences