Job Description

Job Title: Digital Delivery (DevOps Developer)

Reporting to: David Buchanan

Details
Job Purpose
You will work as a Developer within the DevOps Team, focused on maximising the workflow of all development teams through greater automation and management of the toolset used for the development and deployment processes. You will have scope to suggest and progress anything the Team as a whole agree upon over areas like Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, with expectation to maintain and improve these constantly evolving areas over time.
You’ll be adept at working with multiple project teams, breaking down barriers and pro-actively engaging other teams to ensure they are making the best use of the tools and processes you are defining for maximum efficiency. In this, you will be customer-focused and use analytics and data to drive the prioritisation of your roadmap in alignment to business goals. You will balance the need to deliver at pace with the requirements to establish secure process which are auditable and sustain the integrity of both data and code.
You will be core to decisions that build high performing systems and there path to production, you will be expected to continually develop yourself as an individual, adding to a culture where small, regular improvements are the norm and people are excited about their contributions to SLC.
Key Accountabilities
·  Build a deep understanding of the departments digital service, ensure that processes, technology and toolsets are built to support them and understand the dependencies between projects and existing systems
·  Lead the collaborative, dynamic planning process - prioritising the work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
·  Ensuring delivery of solutions that meet customer needs
·  Understand the agile project management methodologies in use and feeding your improvements into the short iteration cycles, gaining
·  Build and maintain a culture of continuous delivery and improvement
·  Excellent knowledge of modern platforms and tools, using the correct product where appropriate, especially open source and open standards
·  Leading a multidisciplinary team, ensuring they are working efficiently to maximise throughput.
·  Ensure all products are built to an appropriate level of quality and there is a clear technical roadmap which addresses performance, resilience and scalability
·  Participate within a Team that operates a self-driven skill development, promoting learning events and facilitating own needs and that of colleagues.
Skills / Experience / Qualifications
Ansible, Linux, ESXi VMware (Power CLI), Repos for RPM/Gems/JARs, RPM Workflow, SQL Databases, No-SQL Databases, AMPQ Services, OpenAM, LDAP, Chef, Capistrano, CI (Go /Jenkins other etc…), Ruby, Rake, JavaScript, SSH, SSL Certificates, Encryption/Decryption, Fire Drills, Automated testing, TDD, Selenium.
Communicating
·  Communicate various option that have been explored as part of an investigation to a group or individual
·  Create high quality documentation that is aligned with the premise of test are documentation.
·  Assist in the on boarding of new members.
Changing and Improving
·  Provide constructive challenge to the Team on change proposals which will affect our business area
·  Spot warning signs of things going wrong and provide a decisive response to significant delivery challenges
·  Proactively work to improve and innovate with best practice methods and technologies.
Displaying Effective Options to Issues
·  Analyse and evaluate pros and cons and identify risks in order to provide context for possible change to the Team, taking into account the wider context, including diversity and sustainability.
·  Display ability to identify solutions to complex problems, verify your understanding via presenting to the Team on a regular basis.
Maintaining a Quality Service
·  Use agile methodologies to manage work with the Team in order to give predicable, repeatable capacity of the Team as a whole giving a consistent view across each project and committed work.
·  Exemplify positive customer service behaviours and promote a culture focused on ensuring customer needs are met through data-driven analytics.
·  Understand how the business area compares to customer service expectations and industry best practice and assist in identifying necessary improvements.
Delivering at Pace
·  Assist in prioritisation exercises, objectives and expectations setting within both individual and Stakeholder contexts.
·  Adopt efficient processes for maximising change delivery. Regularly assess as a key Team member how to remove bottlenecks and improve the flow of the end-to-end delivery process.
·  Maintain effective performance in difficult and challenging circumstances, support colleagues by giving sharing knowledge experience and techniques to other members of the Team.
·  Develop and maintain software that is used to benefit the Team and colleagues wthin SLC as to make all work that we perform transparent and easily accessible.
Collaborating and Partnering
·  Actively build and maintain a network of colleagues and contacts to achieve progress on objectives and shared interests
·  Understand other delivery techniques (Prince, DSDM etc) to join up with existing projects and ways of working.
·  Encourage contributions and involvement from a broad and diverse range of staff by being visible and accessible
·  Be content to work across Teams and situation dependant sit with a pair within another Team for a given period or task, in addition be happy to switch pairs at a moments notice.
·  Seek constructive outcomes in discussions, challenge assumptions but remain willing to compromise when it is beneficial to progress
Specialist Skills and requirements
·  Experience in delivering digital projects and products
·  Proven experience using agile methods
·  Proven experience balancing multiple priorities and dealing with ambiguity
·  Sound understanding of the value of DevOps with knowledge of virtualization, IaaS, PaaS, and cloud services being beneficial.
·  Eagerness to learn and awareness of provisioning tools such as Docker, Chef, Puppet and Ansible, ESXi VMware (Integration testing only)
·  Experience with Continuous Integration tools (ex: Jenkins, Go).
·  Knowledge of scripting languages (ex: Bash, Ruby, Perl, Python)
·  Knowledge of the administration of application servers and web servers for performance and scalability beneficial.
·  Good networking Knowledge
·  An appreciation of automated deployments and the associated goals.
About SLC
Student Loans Company is a non-profit making Government-owned organisation set up in 1989 to provide loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. We are responsible, in partnership with Local Authorities in England and Wales, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland, the Education and Library boards in Northern Ireland, the Higher Education Institutions and HM Revenue & Customs, for student support delivery in the UK.