Mid-Level DevOps Engineer

Please note:  We are not currently working with recruitment agents/agencies at this time

Remote, UK-based. Full-time. Paid on-call.

You must have the existing right to work in the UK. We’re unable to provide visa sponsorship for this role.

We are growing our DevOps team and hiring a Mid-Level Engineer.

About Akoova

We’re a premium Magento/Adobe Commerce PaaS on AWS, and we’ve been at this since 2013. We’re a platform business, not a consultancy: we build and operate the platform, clients’ build and operate their stores on it. We aim to be the best, with the staff and client tenure to prove it

We’re an AWS ISV Accelerate Program partner.

Clients we’ve worked with have included Fred Perry, END., Diptyque, ME+EM, Big Bus Tours, Selco and a Leading European Football Club. We manage the infrastructure, the Magento runtime, the deploy automation and incident response.

Stack-wise, the application stack is: PHP+Apache+Varnish, MySQL/Aurora/MariaDB, Redis/Valkey, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Amazon MQ, EFS. The infra layer has clear roles for each tool: Terraform for most infrastructure, CloudFormation and Ansible for our EC2 auto-scaling groups, Chef for state management, Bash and Python for scripting, and Go for custom binaries.

The honest day-to-day

Client work takes up most of the week. Growing the team is part of how we change that. 

The bulk of it is tickets, requested changes, troubleshooting and deploy support. The next biggest chunk is improving the IaC and tooling we already have. Incident response is shared across the team. There’s also proactive platform work, and we’d like more of it as the team grows.

We’re being explicit about the current shape because mid-level candidates are often promised a 50/50 split that turns into client-driven requests.

This is a great opportunity for an enthusiastic problem-solver who wants to work in a small, growing, customer-centric and highly respected company.

What you’ll do

– Work client tickets through to resolution, escalating when it makes sense

– Write and maintain Chef cookbooks and Terraform for our AWS estate

– Build and improve internal tooling

– Take part in the on-call rota when you’re ready. It’s paid, currently 1-in-4, moving to 1-in-6 once both new engineers are in place.

First six months

– Owning your share of the client ticket queue without escalating routine work.

– Comfortable on the on-call rota and working through the incidents we see (scaling, site-down responses, health issues from bad traffic), with a senior to escalate to for deeper investigation.

– Hands-on with our main IaC stack (Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Bash), with enough Python and Go to make sensible changes (AI assistance is fine).

– Knowing the platform well enough to notice when something’s off.

What we need from you

Four things:

1. Two to five years in a DevOps, SRE, platform, or sysadmin role, with at least two of those on AWS in production.

2. Comfortable with infrastructure-as-code. We use Terraform and Chef. Strong experience with one – and willingness to learn the other – is fine.

3. Solid Linux fundamentals, Bash scripting, MySQL/RDS basics (slow queries, EXPLAIN), and comfort reading observability dashboards and logs.

4. Able to own routine tickets end-to-end, and to recognise when something needs a senior.

Note: Magento or PHP application hosting experience is strongly preferred. We’ll flex on it for the right candidate.

Nice to have

– Magento or any PHP application hosting experience.

– Prior managed services, agency or hosting experience.

– Experience working in a PCI DSS environment (or similar compliance regime).

– Experience with Datadog, New Relic or Sumo Logic. They are our on-call observability stack. We will teach them otherwise.

– Familiarity with GitHub, Github Actions and Jira

What we offer

– Out-of-hours on-call, paid per hour rota’d. You won’t be added to the rota for 8 to 12 weeks.

– Remote, UK-based, full-time.

– 25 days paid annual leave, plus English bank holidays, and your Birthday off.

– Private Medical Insurance.

– Working hours are 9:00am – 5:30pm or 9:30am – 6:00pm, depending on the triage rota (the late triage engineer takes 9:30am – 6:00pm that day).

– MacBook and iPhone provided.

– Dedicated learning time is built into the month.

– A mature platform you’ll be improving and extending.

Who the role isn’t for

– Juniors looking for a stretch. We don’t have the bandwidth to bring someone up right now.

– Anyone who wants pure platform engineering with no client contact. That’s not this role.