Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer

Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer

This is a remote position within the UK. We currently don’t provide visa sponsorship. 

We are a B2B Fintech focusing on disrupting the small business lending market. SMEs make up 99% of all UK businesses yet are traditionally underserved by big banks and financial institutions. Built from nearly a decade of experience powering a digital credit broking marketplace, our SaaS solutions serve banks, lenders, and the wider SME finance ecosystem. Leveraging live, validated transactional data from the UK’s advanced data environment, FXE Technologies’ products drive accurate decisioning and proactive engagement. Our products are used by over 80 leading high street and challenger banks and specialist lenders

Role Description

Behind those products is a platform that has to earn the trust of the institutions that depend on it. FXE is a lean, fast-moving organisation with strong ambitions, and the DevOps team sits at the centre of it. We build and operate multi-tenant platforms used by customers including Tier 1 banks, so everything we build must meet the security, reliability and scale expectations of regulated financial institutions.

It's an exciting time to join. We're delivering several projects that will shape where FXE goes next, and the DevOps team is critical to making them happen.

We're looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to take real ownership of DevOps at FXE. You'll bring deep, hands-on infrastructure and networking expertise, a strong command of Terraform, AWS, identity and access management, delivery pipelines and observability, and recent, extensive experience running infrastructure through automation.

Your decisions on infrastructure, delivery pipelines, operations, FinOps, maintainability and reliability, together with the product and application architecture decisions you help shape, will directly determine how fast the business ships, how confidently it scales and how well it holds up under pressure.

This isn't a role where you quietly maintain someone else's designs. You'll create and help define them. You'll lead infrastructure and delivery initiatives end to end, hold your own in design and planning discussions with the most experienced engineers in the company, and bring modern DevOps, SRE and security thinking to how we build, deploy and run systems.

You'll also be a bridge between DevOps and Engineering. You'll understand infrastructure deeply, but you'll also be able to read, reason about and ideally contribute to application code, so that platform and application decisions are made together rather than handed over a wall.

Beyond product infrastructure and delivery pipelines, the DevOps team is responsible for FXE's security systems, supports our corporate IT infrastructure (including Microsoft 365 and our zero-trust network access), and assists with compliance activity such as SOC 2 and Cyber Essentials Plus. This role shares in all of that, not just product-facing infrastructure.

If you want a role where your judgement genuinely counts, where your thinking will be challenged rather than rubber-stamped, and where the scope runs from network design to production reliability to shaping how Engineering and DevOps work together, this is it.

What you'll do

Infrastructure & platform

• Design, build and operate cloud infrastructure on AWS, with a strong emphasis on IAM and identity services, compute and container services such as EC2 and EKS, networking (VPC design, routing, service mesh, load balancing, DNS, connectivity, segmentation and security boundaries), database services, serverless (e.g. Lambda, Step Functions) and analytics services.
• Own infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and the delivery pipelines that move code changes across environments.
• Design for resilience, maintainability, availability (multi-AZ, failover, self-healing, backup and recovery), security and operability (observability, alerting, capacity), and overall functional and non-functional suitability, efficiency, and effectiveness.
• Securely and reliably integrate and configure 3rd party services used to complement the AWS environment.
• Use languages such as Python to automate DevOps tasks and support production capabilities owned by DevOps
• Identify, document, and remediate as necessary infrastructure and platform-level technical risks following established processes.

Delivery pipelines and developer experience

• Design, build and maintain software delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that are fast, reliable and secure by default.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code configuration, security and guardrail solutions (e.g. Helm charts, Open Policy Agent policies, and EKS admission controllers) to enforce secure, consistent deployment patterns across environments.
• Improve build, test, release and deployment workflows in collaboration with Engineering.
• Contribute to environment strategy (dev/test/staging/production) and release management strategies.
• Support the Engineers during rollouts and deployments.

Bridging DevOps and Engineering

• Work directly with Engineering teams to understand application-level constraints, so infrastructure and pipeline decisions reflect real delivery needs.
• Ideally, read, debug and reason about backend and/or frontend code where needed, enough to have credible technical conversations with engineers, contribute to root-cause analysis, and make informed platform decisions that account for application behaviour.
• Represent DevOps in architecture, design and planning discussions, including with senior engineers and product, and be able to constructively challenge and defend a technical position, as well as understand when trade-offs are necessary.

Leadership and initiative

• Take ownership of significant infrastructure and delivery initiatives from proposal through to delivery and operations.
• Research emerging tools, practices and approaches to identify improvements to our platform, delivery pipelines and operational processes, and propose practical, well-reasoned solutions to the problems you find.
• Participate as a peer in design and planning conversations across DevOps and Engineering, contributing independent judgement rather than executing instructions.
• Support the Head of Architecture and Security and the other DevOps Engineers in technical direction-setting and be capable of covering senior technical decisions and initiatives in their absence.
• Document significant technical decisions (e.g. via ADRs/RFCs), review and contribute to RFCs written by Engineers, and to the team's standards, patterns and reference architectures.

Monitoring, observability and reliability

• Design observability across infrastructure and services: metrics, logs, tracing and alerting that give early warning rather than after-the-fact explanations.
• Bring SRE practice into how the team works: define and track metrics where meaningful, drive incident response and blameless post-incident review, and turn recurring issues into permanent fixes rather than repeat firefighting.
• Continuously improve signal quality, reduce alert noise, close observability gaps, and make it fast to answer "what's actually happening in production right now".

Security, IT infrastructure and compliance support

• Evaluate, monitor, and improve as necessary the security resilience of FXE’s systems. Keep IT and network controls aligned with security and architecture requirements, and to keep audit evidence current and defensible.
• Help support and operate FXE's corporate IT infrastructure, including Microsoft 365 (identity, device management, mail, collaboration tooling) in collaboration with a 3rd party, and our ZTNA network.
• Assist with technical evidence, control implementation and remediation work for compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and Cyber Essentials Plus.
• Balance this work proportionately alongside product infrastructure and delivery responsibilities, this is a supporting part of the role, not the majority of it.

What we are looking for

Essential

• Extensive, hands-on experience in infrastructure; you can design, troubleshoot and reason about network architecture at depth, not just consume managed services.
• Real experience developing, deploying and supporting complex infrastructures made up of many moving parts, not just designing them on a whiteboard. The kind of knowledge and judgement that only comes from having built these systems, watched them break, and fixed them under pressure.
• Strong, production-grade experience with Infrastructure as Code, including design, state management and multi-environment workflows, as well as scripting languages such as Python.
• Deep working knowledge of AWS across compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services in a multi-account setup.
• In-depth understanding of access controls, encryption, and networking concepts and protocols.
• Proven experience designing and operating CI/CD delivery pipelines in a production environment.
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Experience implementing security and guardrail controls in Infrastructure as Code and Kubernetes environments to enforce policy at deploy time rather than relying solely on after-the-fact review.
• Solid experience with monitoring and observability tooling (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) and using it to drive real reliability improvements, not just dashboards.
• SRE experience or equivalent; comfortable owning production reliability, leading or contributing to incident response, and working from SLIs/SLOs where appropriate.
• Recent, hands-on experience developing and supporting modern, multi-tenant systems, using AI-assisted tooling and workflows in day-to-day engineering, current DevOps practices, and close, ongoing collaboration with developers/engineers.
• Track record of taking technical ownership of initiatives from design through to delivery, with minimal oversight.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a credible technical peer in design and architecture discussions with senior/lead-level engineers.
• Working knowledge of software development sufficient to read and reason about application code (backend and/or frontend) and engage meaningfully with engineers on design trade-offs.
• Solid understanding of resilience, security and operability considerations in infrastructure design (e.g. failover, backup/recovery, least-privilege access, secrets management, observability).
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable documenting decisions and rationale for technical and non-technical audiences.

Desirable

• Experience working in a small or mid-sized organisation where DevOps and Engineering are separate but tightly coupled teams.
• Experience with configuration/decision-recording practices such as ADRs and RFCs.
• Hands-on development experience in Kotlin/Java and/or React, beyond simply reading code.
• Experience administering Microsoft 365 (identity, device management, security configuration) and/or ZTNA network solutions.
• Direct experience supporting SOC 2 and/or Cyber Essentials Plus certification or renewal, including evidence gathering and control remediation.

How you’ll work

• You'll report to the Head of Architecture and Security, and work day-to-day alongside the DevOps team, sharing ownership of the infrastructure and delivery platform rather than working in a silo. This includes being part of on call rotas.
• You'll engage directly and regularly with Engineering; this role is as much about acting as bridge between platform and application teams as it is about infrastructure delivery.
• You'll be trusted to make and defend significant technical decisions independently, with appropriate visibility and documentation rather than sign-off at every step.

What success looks like

• First 30 days
  You've built a working understanding of FXE's infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and the applications they support, enough to start contributing to technically sound, well-reasoned decisions that reflect real application constraints, not just infrastructure best practice in isolation. You've met the Engineering and Product teams you'll be working with and understand how DevOps and Engineering currently collaborate.

• First 60 days
  You're an active contributor to the DevOps team and joint decisions between Engineering and DevOps rather than someone waiting to be looped in; collaboration on initiatives has visibly increased as a result. You've taken ownership of at least one meaningful piece of infrastructure or pipeline work, and the DevOps team's delivery capacity is measurably higher with you in it.

• First 90+ days
  You're leading significant initiatives end to end, from design through to operations, with clear ownership and minimal oversight. You're recognised as a credible technical peer by the team's most experienced engineers. You regularly collaborate in the definition of designs and architecture patterns through mechanisms such as RFC reviews. You are actively contributing to the definition and delivery of DevOps strategic roadmap items, as well as the improvement to the efficiency and effectiveness of processes and tools.

Benefits

• Salary banding 70K-85K GBP.
• This position offers fully-remote work, you must be based within the UK.
• Flexible working.
• Autoenrollment in the pension scheme with contributions from FXE.
• 25 days annual leave PLUS UK Bank Holidays.
• Talent Referral Scheme.
• Regular socials and team get togethers.

FXE is an equal opportunities employer and all positions are open to all suitably qualified candidates, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.