DevOps Engineer (12M FTC)

Introduction

Saab UK is part of Scandinavia’s largest defence company, bringing together the best of Swedish and British innovation. Saab offers world-leading solutions and services in defence, aviation, space, and civil security to keep people and society safe. Our UK presence has been growing at pace, meaning we can offer a wide range of opportunities for personal fulfilment and career growth. We currently employ over 500 people across eight sites in the UK, and our specialisations include software engineering, underwater robotics, radars, AI, and armed forces training.

As part of the global entity Saab AB, Saab UK combines the innovative spirit of a start-up with the resources and expertise of a larger corporation. Globally, Saab employs over 22,000 people, with operations on every continent. Our partnerships with UK customers and industry mean we are able to deliver innovative solutions to complex challenges, anticipating the threats of tomorrow. We invest 23% of our annual revenue into research and development, collaborating with a range of partners including industry and academia.

Saab is a company that offers our employees plenty of opportunities for growth and advancement. We embrace diversity and are committed to providing a workplace where individuals can thrive professionally, paving the way for future progression. We also recognise the need for a healthy work-life balance to ensure our staff have the chance to live a fulfilling life beyond the workplace.

Role Overview

You will be part of Public Safety Solutions (PSS), which develops advanced software applications and solutions for mission critical control room operations including for Police, Fire & Rescue and Airports. Within PSS, the Platform team is accountable for providing the foundational infrastructure used to deliver our customers’ managed-service environments.

As a DevOps Engineer with a VMware administration and infrastructure-as-code background, you will build and maintain the VMware foundation used across multiple managed service deployments.  You will work with customers to integrate the VMware network with their environment. You will also work with engineers based in both the UK and Sweden to enhance automation capability for the SAFE command & control product, including the provisioning and management of platform-related components.

Key responsibilities

• Engineer and develop foundational deployments for VMware
• Develop infrastructure-as-code in VMware environments
• Work with customers to enable deployment of VMware in their datacenters
• Help manage vendors in terms of hyperconverged infrastructure delivery and setup
• Build the customer VMWare foundation to support deployment of the application
• Provide third-line support to the operations teams when required.

Experience/Qualifications

Essential requirements

• 5+ years VMware vSphere & vSAN administration and troubleshooting
• 2+ years working with infrastructure-as-code in DevOps environments
• Demonstrable experience of working with high availability environments and systems
• Demonstrable knowledge and experience in multiple of the following areas:
  • Terraform (including vSphere provider)
  • Packer (including vsphere-iso provider)
  • vSphere networking, load balancing, content library, resource pools, folders, RBAC
  • Physical networking (including Firewalls, SD-WAN, VxLAN, VRF, VPN)
  • DHCP, DNS, NTP
  • Datacenter infrastructure (racks, power, heat)
  • Everything-as-code, git, pipelines (GitHub Actions, self-hosted agents)
• Documentation-as-code (vscode, git, markdown, excalidraw)
• Highly attentive with the ability to deal with changing priorities and context switching.
• A positive attitude to innovation, change and transformation are essential characteristics to be successful in this role.
• Excellent communication skills – written and verbal.

Desirable, but not essential

• Dell VxRail solutions
• Immutable infrastructure approach to patching
• Familiarity with HashiCorp KeyVault and/or Harbour Container Registry
• SIEM integration
• Networking (Load balancing, Firewalls, TCP/IP)
• Datacenter infrastructure management
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies, tools and ways of working.