Senior DevOps​/Automation Engineer - Ansible

Senior Dev Ops / Automation Engineer - Ansible

6-Month contract - Inside IR35 - up to £480 per day

London or Sheffield based - hybrid working - 2-3 days a week at 1 of the locations

Banking sector

Role Purpose

We are delivering a strategic automation and Dev Ops modernisation programme across IBM Z and distributed platforms. This role will design and engineer production grade automation, CI/CD integration, compliance verification, observability pipelines, and secure orchestration capabilities across a global estate.

You will work across Python, PostgreSQL, Git based workflows, Jenkins pipelines, Ansible orchestration, secrets management, artefact management, and observability tooling to build resilient, auditable and scalable automation services.

Key Responsibilities

Automation Engineering & Orchestration
Design and build robust automation using Python and YAML.
Develop and maintain Ansible playbooks in Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) for production orchestration.
Ensure idempotent, restartable and state-aware automation patterns.
Integrate automation across distributed and IBM Z platforms (including z/OS job execution patterns where relevant).
Implement failure handling, retry logic and operational guardrails.
CI/CD & Dev Ops Toolchain Integration
Build and maintain pipelines in Git Hub and Jenkins (including Groovy-based pipeline development).
Embed automated compliance checks and quality gates.
Integrate artefact management via Nexus Repository.
Support Git based workflow design (branching strategy, pull requests, code reviews, tagging and release patterns).
Observability & Monitoring
Design dashboards and telemetry pipelines using Grafana.
Integrate logging/metrics with enterprise observability platforms (e.g. Splunk).
Build automated compliance and drift dashboards.
Create structured reporting for audit and operational governance.
Data & Persistence
Design schemas and automation state handling in PostgreSQL.
Implement run state tracking, job history retention, and audit evidence capture.
Optimise queries and data handling for operational reliability.
Security & Secrets Management
Implement secure secret handling using Hashi Corp Vault.
Integrate Vault with CI/CD and AAP workflows.
Apply least privilege principles and secure credential lifecycle management.
Contribute to enterprise standards for secrets, tokens and service accounts.
Governance, Standards & Compliance
Embed compliance verification into pipelines (automated controls, evidence capture).
Contribute to standards for Git Hub, Jenkins, AAP and workflow governance.
Support configuration drift detection and remediation automation.
Ensure documentation suitable for internal risk, audit and regulatory stakeholders.

Required Technical Skills

Core

Strong Python development (production quality code, modular design, error handling, logging, testing).
PostgreSQL (schema design, performance tuning, operational usage).
YAML (clean, structured automation definitions).
Git and Git based CI/CD practices.
Jenkins pipeline development (Groovy).

Experience with enterprise scale Ansible via AAP.
Grafana dashboard development and metrics interpretation.
Nexus or equivalent artefact repository management.
Hashi Corp Vault integration and secrets automation.

Desirable

IBM Z familiarity (z/OS concepts, JCL, batch scheduling).
z/OS workflow tooling such as IBM z/OSMF and/or Zowe CLI.

Experience with enterprise schedulers (e.g., IWS patterns).
Configuration drift management frameworks.
API integration design.
Infrastructure-as-Code governance models.
Observability exporters and metrics pipelines.
Experience in regulated financial environments.

Engineering Expectations

The successful candidate will:

Design automation as resilient systems, not scripts.
Build restartable and observable…