DevOps Engineer

About Nomad Digital

Nomad Digital is the world's leading provider of passenger and fleet connectivity solutions to the railway industry. Founded in 2002, and headquartered in the UK, currently serving more than 80+ global customers - in more than 40 countries - Nomad designs, builds, deploys and manages passenger Wi-Fi and on-board passenger infotainment systems. Nomad also provides remote online condition-based monitoring and maintenance solutions for optimising fleet management, operational performance and improving fuel economy.

When you join Nomad Digital, you will join a forward thinking, fast-growing, fun environment with access to some of the very latest technology in its field. You will work with experts who innovate collaboratively, creating an environment of team work and trustworthiness. 

Overview:

Working within an agile R&D product team (developers, QA, DevOps), you will be the team’s expert in CI/CD automation, currently built on GitLab. You will take the automation code produced by the wider R&D team (today mainly Puppet modules and Ansible playbooks, and in future whatever tools best fit the job) and turn it into reliable, automated deployment pipelines, so that every planned and patch release is rolled out safely, repeatably and at scale rather than by hand. Because much of the estate is remote, resource-constrained and intermittently connected, every change must be automated, tested, controlled and reversible.
You will also help the team adopt AI-assisted engineering tools in a safe, secure and auditable way.  

The role requires an individual with 3+ years of relevant experience and a strong sense of ownership for production quality. 

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Deployment automation 

• Use and configure the team’s configuration-management and automation code (currently Puppet and Ansible) to deploy, update and maintain systems across the whole hybrid estate. 

• Maintain customer-specific configuration and data so deployments stay consistent, parameterised and free of duplication. 

• Turn manual or operator-run deployment and update procedures into automated, pipeline-driven workflows. 

• Plan and carry out controlled rollouts of both planned and patch releases, using staged and rolling deployments, pre- and post-deployment health checks, automatic stop on failure, manual approval gates where needed and tested rollback to a known-working version. 

• Ensure deployments are safe for remote, resource-constrained and intermittently connected systems. 

• Coordinate releases across the estate so related changes ship together under one versioned release, with the deployed state recorded and reported. 

• Work closely with the developers who build the automation code: test new versions, report defects with clear evidence, and feed back deployment requirements and improvements. 

• Evaluate and adopt new automation, deployment and infrastructure-as-code tools as the needs of the estate and the business evolve. 

CI/CD pipelines and release engineering 

• Act as the team’s subject-matter expert for CI/CD (currently GitLab CI/CD): design, build and maintain pipelines, reusable templates, runners and pipeline images. 

• Choose the right deployment model for each part of the estate (push, pull or GitOps), with CI/CD testing and promoting releases, and orchestration tools carrying them out where appropriate. 

• Build automated quality gates into deployment pipelines, e.g. linting, dry runs and configuration diffs, and acceptance testing on reference or virtual systems. 

• Make greater use of virtual machines inside CI/CD pipelines (e.g. KVM / QEMU / libvirt, cloud-init, Packer) to create disposable test environments, run automated tasks and tests against them, and tear them down automatically. 

• Automate release workflows end to end: versioning and tagging, release notes generated from the issue tracker, documentation publishing and promotion of changes between environments. 

• Keep pipelines secure: protected and masked secrets and variables, protected branches and tags, least-privilege runner and token access, and secret and dependency scanning. 

• Measure and improve pipeline speed, reliability and the developer experience for the wider team. 

AI-assisted engineering 

• Use AI coding assistants productively to write, review, test and document pipelines, deployment configuration and scripts. 

• Apply and help define safe-use practices: use only company-approved tools; never share secrets, credentials or customer data with AI tools; treat AI output as untrusted until reviewed and tested; keep human approval on every change that reaches production. 

• Ensure AI-generated changes go through the same review, CI quality gates and change control as any other change, with clear traceability. 

• Share good practice with the team and help evaluate new AI tooling against our security and compliance requirements. 

Operations, support and quality 

• Diagnose and resolve faults across Linux, networking and application layers. 

• Work closely with developers and QA so that all work is tested and checked before deployment; build test specifications and test plans, and document the results. 

• Configure and install network equipment such as wireless access points and switches, covering both software configuration and physical set-up. 

• Keep deployment, pipeline and process documentation current for internal and external audiences, and manage handover and training for support staff. 
• Adhere to all system audit, security and regulatory requirements (including data protection and other legal obligations), and recognise when to escalate matters within the team. 

Qualifications Requirements

Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience) with relevant certifications in CI/CD, infrastructure automation (Ansible/Puppet), Linux, cloud technologies, monitoring, and Python programming.

Experience Requirements

Senior DevOps/Platform Engineer with expertise in GitLab CI/CD, Ansible/Puppet automation, Linux administration, release engineering, networking, virtualization, and infrastructure-as-code, with desirable experience in Kubernetes, GitOps, cloud platforms, monitoring, and hybrid edge-to-cloud environments.

Benefits

• Health Care Cash Plan.
  
• Life Assurance.
  
• Critical Illness Cover
• Contributory Pension Scheme via Aviva.
  
• 25 Days of Annual Leave with enhanced leave based on tenure.
• Annual Leave Purchase Scheme
  
• Car Lease Scheme
• Workplace Nursery Scheme
• Employee Referral Scheme / Employee Recognition Scheme.
  
• Company Sick Plan.
  
• Free Onsite Gym 
• Hybrid Working Model - The role will consist of a mix of working from home and being in our Newcastle Head Office.

Our Commitment:

Nomad Digital is committed to being an inclusive and diverse employer, as well as providing equal opportunities in employment and freedom from unlawful discrimination on the grounds of age, race, ethnic or national origin, sex, pregnancy and maternity, marital or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, disability, religion or beliefs.

We encourage and welcome all job applicants, especially those from diverse backgrounds and ensure everyone is treated equally and without discrimination.

Where possible we are happy to consider flexible working arrangements or appropriate reasonable adjustments on request. To discuss further, please email [email protected].