Sr Associate - DevOps

Description

The Lead Associate - DevOps plays a central role in designing, building, and maintaining Davies’ Azure cloud environment. The role supports the organisation’s cloud-first strategy, enabling scalable, secure, and automated delivery of modern platform services and helping accelerate our transition from on premise infrastructure into cloud native operations.

This role is responsible for delivering high-quality automation, infrastructure-as-code patterns, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud governance structures. You will work closely with Application Architects, Developers, Product Managers, and Infrastructure Engineers to ensure cloud services are robust, efficient, and aligned to strategic technology direction.

The Lead Associate - DevOps contributes to the evolution of DevOps capabilities, driving best practices across engineering teams and acting as a subject matter expert in Azure services, automation tooling, and operational cloud excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture, Design & Implementation

• Design, plan and implement Azure cloud solutions with a strong focus on automation, IaC, and DevOps principles.
• Lead and deliver cloud platform projects including systems architecture, proofs-of-concept, and production deployments.
• Support the transition of on-premise workloads into Azure, ensuring resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Contribute to the development of cloud governance frameworks covering networking, identity, security, tagging, and operational processes.

Automation, Tooling & DevOps

• Build, maintain, and optimise Azure CI/CD pipelines (YAML-based), integrating automated testing and quality checks.
• Develop infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, ARM/Bicep, and Git-based workflows.
• Create and maintain scripts using PowerShell and AZ CLI to drive automation, repeatability, and operational efficiency.
• Ensure cloud environments follow best practice for monitoring, logging, backup, and disaster recovery.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Partner closely with .NET development teams to strengthen cloud-native development and deployment skills.
• Work alongside Application Architects and Security teams to ensure platform designs meet strategic and compliance requirements.
• Support Product Managers to ensure platform initiatives align to business objectives and delivery timelines.
• Provide technical input on solution designs, cloud patterns, and build/release strategies.

Support, Operations & Continuous Improvement

• Resolve cloud-related issues, ensuring reliability, performance, and security of Azure services.
• Identify opportunities for automation, optimisation, and governance improvement across the platform.
• Actively contribute to continuous improvement in DevOps maturity, engineering tooling, and cloud operating models.
• Maintain high-quality documentation covering cloud environments, patterns, and processes.

Coaching & Mentoring

• Provide coaching and mentorship to less experienced developers.
• Support skill development across teams using the SFIA-based capability framework.
• Lead by example in professionalism, technical discipline, and collaboration.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Knowledge, Skill, ability

• Total experience - 8+ Yrs
• Experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Sentinel, or similar cloud monitoring/security tools.
• Familiarity with containerisation (Docker, AKS) and modern deployment patterns.
• Exposure to cloud cost management and FinOps practices.
• Understanding of .NET development environments and build pipelines.

Essential requirement (non-negotiable) *

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure IaaS and PaaS services in a DevOps environment.
• Advanced experience building Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines (including YAML).
• Strong proficiency in Terraform (or comparable IaC tooling).
• Strong scripting skills using PowerShell and AZ CLI.
• Understanding of cloud governance, security, networking, identity, RBAC, and resource organisation.
• Knowledge of DevOps principles including automation, observability, GitOps, and continuous delivery.
• Experience supporting cloud migrations from on-premise environments.

About Davies

We are a specialist professional services and technology firm, working in partnership with leading insurance, highly regulated and global businesses.

We help our clients to manage risk, operate their core business processes, transform and grow. We deliver professional services and technology solutions across the risk and insurance value chain, including excellence in claims, underwriting, distribution, regulation & risk, customer experience, human capital, digital transformation & change management.

Our global team of more than 8,000 professionals operate across ten countries, including the UK & the U.S. Over the past ten years Davies has grown its annual revenues more than 20-fold, investing heavily in research & development, innovation & automation, colleague development, and client service. Today the group serves more than 1,500 insurance, financial services, public sector, and other highly regulated clients.