Senior Associate Engineer (Digital Product Team)

Location: London, Watford, Bristol or Isle of Man (Hybrid working options available)

Are you a software developer who loves not just building great products, but running them in production too? We are seeking a talented Senior Associate Engineer to join our dynamic cross-functional team and help shape the future of digital innovation. First and foremost you will be a capable, hands-on developer who enjoys designing and building features across the stack, and, as a broad, T-shaped engineer, you will also bring a particular interest in the operational side of engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), observability, and the delivery pipelines that get our work safely to production. This is a blended role: you will spend plenty of your time building product features as well as running them, and you will genuinely enjoy both. If you are passionate about Digital products, technology, and driving meaningful outcomes, this is the role for you!

CLUK have ambitious plans to modernise their IT (Information Technology) estate, looking to leverage the cloud and automation at every opportunity and change how we fundamentally deliver solutions, transitioning from a Project to Product approach.

You will be working at every stage of a product lifecycle deployment, from conception, design, implementation, testing and through to operational support, living our "you build it, you run it" philosophy.

Job Purpose

As a Senior Associate Engineer you will be a capable software developer, comfortable designing and building features across the stack, with a solid grounding in full lifecycle software development. On top of that, you will have a genuine interest in what happens after the code is written, how we deploy, operate, observe, and continuously improve our services in production.

• Designing, building, deploying, and supporting software across front and backend stacks
• Building and maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines and test automation to facilitate a seamless, repeatable route to production for Azure hosted solutions
• Operating and supporting environments up to and including production, instrumenting services with meaningful observability so we can trust our releases and respond quickly when something goes wrong

You will also have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes, and you want to make data-informed decisions.

Duties/Responsibilities

• Design and build product features across the front and back end, engaging fully in the development lifecycle of applications and tools and contributing hands-on to all development tasks, from coding to reviewing and releasing to production. Collaborate closely with team members, product owners, and stakeholders.
• Live the "you build it, you run it" model. Implement and refine DevOps practices, building and owning CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure as code, and instrumenting services with observability (metrics, logs, and traces) so their health is visible. Take part in operating live services, including release management, alerting, and incident response, while actively reducing toil, technical debt, and manual effort through automation.
• Take ownership of personal learning paths, continually acquiring new skills, particularly across operations, SRE, and observability, to enhance team solutions and individual performance.

Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• You are a capable, hands-on software developer who enjoys designing and building product features across the front and back end. The operations and SRE focus in this role is something you bring in addition to strong development skills, not instead of them, and you should be equally happy shipping product features as you are improving how we run them.
• You have developed modern component-oriented front end applications using frameworks and libraries and have a good appreciation of UX (User eXperience).
• Solid working knowledge of C# and the .NET stack. Our current tech stack is primarily Microsoft / Azure focused; C# is our primary language.
• Advocate of key principles such as SOLID and CLEAN code, applying to all areas of development. Keen to write code that is self-explanatory and easy to maintain.
• You have a sound grasp of modern engineering principles and prefer working in small iterations that optimise feedback. You like to validate hypotheses via experiments.
• Alongside your development work, a genuine interest in operations and Site Reliability Engineering, and you care about how services actually behave in production, not just whether they pass their tests.
• Experience (or a strong desire to grow) building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automating the path to production. We use GitHub Actions and Octopus Deploy, but an understanding of the principles behind CI/CD is more important than the specific tooling you have used. You will have worked in an environment that deploys regularly to production.
• An appreciation of observability, using metrics, logs, and traces (for example Azure Monitor / Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry) to understand system health, and an interest in SLIs/SLOs and alerting.
• Comfort with, or enthusiasm to learn, Infrastructure as Code to provision and manage environments in a repeatable, reviewable way.
• A willingness to take part in operational duties such as releases, incident response, and keeping live services healthy and reliable.
• You have an awareness of security principles and best practices to ensure secure software delivery.
• You are committed to continuous learning, staying abreast of evolving industry technologies and trends, and are keen to share and contribute to our community.
• You have experience working within an agile environment; waterfall projects are a red flag to you.
• You own change all the way to production, and the idea that a different team would test your work, or that it will not rapidly ship to production, does not sit well with you.
• You enjoy working with others and contributing to technical excellence as part of an active community.