Lead DevOps Engineer

Salary banding: £90,000 - £110,000 dependent on experience

Working pattern: 1-2 days per week in office

Location: London

About our Engineering Team

As a business which has AI at its core, we need to have a reliable, scalable and secure real-time ML platform to deliver our product to customers. The Engineering team makes this happen.

The team is UK-based, with a significant contingent in London, and is made up of pragmatic, curious and collaborative problem-solvers who are passionate about working with our Data Scientists to build state of the art AI products. Our Software Engineers bring together a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds; what unites us is a desire to learn, a mastery of our discipline and strong technical prowess.

Our engineers are responsible for all aspects of the software development lifecycle. You will get the opportunity to work across our entire stack building features which deliver AI capabilities to some of the biggest names in the insurance industry.

We are developing a modern real-time ML platform using technologies like Python, PyTorch, Ray, k8s (helm + flux), Terraform, Postgres and Flink on AWS. We are very big fans of Infrastructure-as-Code and enjoy Agile practices. 

As a team, we're driven by a relentless focus on delivering real value to customers at speed. We embrace modern engineering practices such as automated testing, continuous monitoring, feature flags, and on-demand production-like environments to support frequent, reliable releases.

Our team is tackling several big challenges, including:

• Building a real-time config driven user interface toolbox that seamlessly adapts to diverse customer needs
• Deploying all changes, including complex machine learning models, reliably to customers within 15 minutes with fully automated tests
• Build out new exciting product features that broaden our product scope to newer challenges
• Centralised reporting/metrics for both the business and our customers

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Ownership - lead and maintain our IaC platform, ensuring infrastructure services are scalable, maintainable, and upgraded with minimal effort. Help to establish and enforce best practices for infrastructure maintenance and automation.
• Platform Project Leadership - take ownership of major infrastructure projects, ensuring alignment with business and engineering needs. Provide guidance to Senior Engineers, ensuring new initiatives follow established best practices.
• Cost Management & Optimisation - monitor and manage cloud and infrastructure costs, ensuring efficient resource utilisation. Identify opportunities for cost savings and drive initiatives to optimise spend without compromising performance.
• Reliability & Performance - champion best practices for reliability, scalability, and observability. Champion the improvement of monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes to minimise downtime and ensure service continuity.
• Security & Compliance - apply an enterprise security mindset, incorporating zero-trust security principles where applicable. Leverage existing security best practices while ensuring infrastructure remains compliant and secure.

Requirements

• Technical proficiency
• Must haves:
• Deep understanding of DevOps principles, practices and tooling
• Expertise in AWS
• Expertise in using tools like Terraform to manage infrastructure configuration
• Expertise with containerisation and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes
• Knowledge of building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for efficient software delivery. 
• Nice to have:
• Coding skills in Python
• Knowledge of other areas of our tech stack (GitLab, Flink, Helm, FluxCD etc.)
• Knowledge of enterprise security best practices
• Proven experience in leading successful technical projects with an infrastructure / platform focus.
• Ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Naturally collaborative, with excellent communication and teamwork abilities.
• We also expect a solid understanding of modern software development lifecycles. Code & tests, pull requests, code reviews, CI/CD, QA and production releases in an agile, rapidly changing environment 
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to think critically and creatively
• Self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability

Sprout.ai Values

🌱 Hungry for Growth - Unleash your inner Sprout: Sprouts embrace growth, forget comfort zones, and help Sprout.ai thrive.

🚚 Own It, Deliver It - We commit, we deliver, and we exceed expectations - it's how we achieve outstanding outcomes for our customers.

🌳 Seed Innovation - The future is shaped by those who dare to innovate. We embrace this mindset, planting the seeds for future growth, experimenting fearlessly and taking bold actions that unleash our ability to scale.

🤝 Collaborate to Blossom - We cultivate collaboration, working together to create a vibrant and diverse ecosystem where every Sprout can thrive. It drives better results, and creates a better environment for us all.

Engineering Practices

In addition to our core company values, these are some of the practices within the engineering team that define how we work and grow together:

🔧 Value-Driven Development: We avoid premature optimisation and focus on delivering value to our customers based on known requirements.

🚀 Proactive Mindset: We embrace the philosophy of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, encouraging innovation and swift action.

⚡ Efficient Decision-Making: We optimise towards faster decision-making processes, distinguishing between reversible (two-way doors) and irreversible (one-way doors) decisions.

🤝 Equality of Opportunity: We strive to provide equality of opportunity for all team members, regardless of title or position, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment.

Compensation, benefits and perks

• Salary banding: £90,000 - £110,000 dependent on experience. Annual pay reviews.
• Sprout.ai Share Options
• 28 days’ annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Hybrid working with up to 4 days per week working from home
• Private Health Insurance + Dental Insurance
• Learning and Development budget
• Monthly socials, both in London and Virtual
• WeWork perks - barista, social events, snacks etc.
• Macbook Pro + home working setup

About Sprout.ai

Sprout.ai was established in London, UK in 2018 with a mission to help people in their time of need when making an insurance claim. Inefficient claims processing for the insurer meant that customer experience was suffering and people were losing faith in their insurance policies. The average insurance customer was having to wait over 25 days to receive an outcome on their claim, often in times of vulnerability.

The barriers to rapid claims settlement were clear; understanding of unstructured data, complexity and volume of decision making, legacy systems and processes.

Sprout.ai’s patented claims automation platform solves these challenges, and has already delivered instant claims settlement on millions of insurance claims around the world. Our proprietary AI products can automate every step of the claims journey: extracting and enhancing relevant claims data, cross-checking this with policies and providing recommendations to conclude a claim in near real-time. Our tools are allowing claims handlers to spend more time with customers, where human touch and empathy can make the most difference to their customers.

Leading VCs saw our company vision to ‘make every claim better’ and have supported our growth journey. This includes our $11M Series A led by Octopus Ventures in 2021 and in total we have raised over $20M.