The CoE Lead - CloudOps & Platform is a pivotal role within the Group Technology team at JD Sports Fashion Plc, responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a standardised DevOps framework. This hands-on technical position focuses on enabling the deployment of reliable, scalable, performant, and secure services in production.
The CoE Lead will collaborate with Engineering, Service Reliability, Information Security, Architecture, QA, Production Enablement, Observation, and Service Delivery teams to enhance our DevOps capabilities. The role involves a 75% focus on designing frameworks and a 25% focus on implementation and adoption.
Key responsibilities include developing CI/CD pipelines, ensuring cloud infrastructure adheres to best practices, supporting incident management, and driving automation and best practices across the organisation. Additionally, the CoE Lead will manage contracts with third-party providers responsible for the execution layer, ensuring they meet performance standards, adhere to SLAs and KPIs, and integrate seamlessly with our workflows. This role is essential for maintaining high service availability, optimising performance, and ensuring customer satisfaction, particularly during peak trading periods. The ideal candidate will be a strategic thinker with strong technical skills, capable of leading continuous improvement initiatives and fostering a culture of excellence in DevOps practices
· Job Title – Centre Of Excellence Lead- Cloud & Platform
· Location – BL9 8RR
· Working rota – Monday Friday
· Working hours – 40
What You'll Be Doing:
CI/CD Pipeline Development:
- Select the right suite of tools to design and build the CI/CD pipeline collaboratively across Global Technology.
- Onboard development teams onto the pipeline and continuously improve it to make it seamless for the teams.
- Enable observability for the services within the pipeline across multiple environments.
Cloud Infrastructure:
- Design and build cloud infrastructure that is scalable, performant, and adheres to Information Security principles and best practices.
- Ensure infrastructure resources are running up-to-date versions and enable development teams to upgrade and maintain them on an ongoing basis.
Incident Management and Support:
- Support incident management responses for cloud and infrastructure issues and enable quick restoration of services.
- Build and design mechanisms to provide cost and resource utilisation of the services that are easily accessible, transparent, and granular.
Automation and Best Practices:
- Design standardised pipelines adopting best practices and using tools that help automate deployment, accommodating requirements from Development, QA & Test, Release, and Information Security.
- Actively remove friction for various teams involved in the value chain of releasing technology services to cloud environments.
- Advocate and enable autonomy of teams to deploy services and workloads into production and onboard teams onto the pipeline.
- Maintain the roadmap of features and upgrades to the pipelines to keep up with technology innovations and the product roadmap.
Contract Management:
- Oversee the management of third-party provider contracts responsible for the execution layer of DevOps.
- Ensure adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) as outlined in the contracts.
- Lead negotiations for contract renewals and amendments, securing favourable terms and conditions.
- Monitor vendor performance and manage relationships to ensure high-quality service delivery.
Ensure third-party providers are integrated seamlessly into the organisation's workflows and align with the overall strategic vision
What We're Looking For:
- Technical Expertise:
- Subject matter expert in DevOps, Cloud Management, and FinOps.
- Experience working in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Azure).
- Experience designing and building Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks (e.g., Terraform).
- Experience building pipelines from scratch.
- Knowledge of configuration management, service management, and release management toolkits to enable a high degree of automation across those areas.
- Knowledge of containerisation and orchestration of workloads across multiple environments.
- Proficiency in programming languages, particularly Bash and Python, from a cloud and infrastructure management perspective.
- Knowledge of Information Security best practices and enabling the adoption of these practices throughout the lifecycle.
The Company:
The JD Group is a leading omnichannel retailer of Sports Fashion, Street & Premium Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with over 90,000 colleagues over 4,500 stores across several retail fascia's in over 36 countries around the world.
We are an equal opportunities employer who embraces and values differences. We recognise the importance of an inclusive workplace culture in which everyone can thrive irrespective of their background or identity.
To be a part of this successful and continuously growing company, you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people first, a digital leader and customer focused organisation which provides operational excellence and is continuous with identifying new areas of growth into our day-to-day.
We know our employees work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits:
- Incremental Holiday Allowance
- Staff Discount on qualifying purchases across Group retail stores and online
- Exclusive Colleague Bike Discount scheme
- Discounted Gym membership
- Personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work
- Access to Apprenticeships and accredited qualifications
Interested?
If you are interested in this position, then press the Apply Now button.
Due to the high volumes of applications our opportunities attract, it takes time to review them all. If you don't hear back within two weeks of your application, please consider your application to have been unsuccessful on this occasion
Applications that meet the skills criteria will be contacted for a 1st stage meeting with the talent team. Shortlisted candidates will then be invited to interview with the hiring manager.
Thank you again for your time.
