Senior DevOps EngineerCircle Cloud Communications Ltd • Southampton, England, United Kingdom
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Senior DevOps Engineer
Circle Cloud Communications Ltd
- Southampton, England, United Kingdom
- Southampton, England, United Kingdom
About
Circle Cloud Communications Ltd is a telecommunications provider operating carrier-grade, on-prem infrastructure. We maintain our own IP space via RIPE, run our own ASN, and deliver business-critical unified communications and telephony services. We're also building Olatti, our next-generation business phone system, which runs on the same infrastructure estate.
The Senior DevOps Engineer owns the platform layer of that estate: virtualisation, storage, container orchestration, and the automation that holds it all together. You'll run the infrastructure beneath two products - the established circle.cloud telephony platform and the new Olatti platform - on one shared estate of our own hardware in UK data centres. Keeping data on infrastructure we control is a deliberate choice, and this role is central to it.
This is a hands-on senior engineering role. You'll work alongside the Infrastructure Manager, who owns the network layer, and you'll be the senior authority on everything that runs on top of it: hypervisors, storage clusters, Kubernetes, deployment pipelines, and the monitoring that tells us about problems before customers do.
*About the Environment*
* On-prem, bare-metal infrastructure across four interconnected sites
* Fibre ring topology with geographic resilience
* Minimal public cloud usage
* Business-critical production telecoms services with real-world uptime demands
* Two product platforms - circle.cloud and Olatti - running on one shared estate
* A small, capable team where senior engineers own their domain end to end
*Key Responsibilities*
_Virtualisation & Compute_
* Operate, maintain, and improve our Proxmox VE virtualisation estate across all data centre sites
* Own capacity planning, host lifecycle, and hypervisor upgrades with minimal service impact
* Ensure the compute layer meets the availability demands of real-time communications workloads
_Storage_
* Own storage architecture, performance, and integrity across the estate, including Ceph and block storage
* Own backup and recovery: replication, retention, and restore procedures that are tested regularly, not assumed to work
* Plan and execute storage growth ahead of demand from both platforms
_Container Orchestration_
* Run container orchestration in production day to day
* Lead our continued move deeper into Kubernetes: cluster design, workload migration, and operational standards
* Support development teams on both products with reliable build, deployment, and runtime environments
_Automation & Infrastructure as Code_
* Build and maintain infrastructure as code with Ansible and Terraform - the estate should be reproducible from code, not folklore
* Automate routine operations, patching, and provisioning across both platforms
* Drive configuration consistency across sites and environments
_Monitoring, Reliability & Incident Response_
* Own monitoring and alerting for the platform layer, keeping signal high and noise low
* Act as senior escalation for platform-level incidents on either product, including out-of-hours escalation on a planned basis
* Contribute to post-incident reviews with clear root cause analysis and corrective actions
* Participate in disaster recovery and failover testing across the estate
_Documentation & Collaboration_
* Maintain accurate runbooks, diagrams, and SOPs for the platform layer
* Put forward architecture proposals and business cases to the Infrastructure Manager for review and approval
* Collaborate with the network, service, and development teams to align platform work with product needs on both circle.cloud and Olatti
* Get hands-on in the data centre when the work calls for it
*Required Experience*
* Five or more years in DevOps or infrastructure roles, ideally in SaaS, telecoms, or other infrastructure-heavy environments
* Production Kubernetes experience - designing, running, and debugging real workloads. This is the single biggest win.
* Strong Proxmox experience, especially Ceph and block storage - a close second
* Solid infrastructure-as-code habits with Ansible, Terraform, or similar
* Linux administration at scale, bare metal and virtual
* Experience operating production-critical environments where uptime is non-negotiable
* Strong documentation habits in production environments
* UK-based, within reach of Southampton for office days and data centre visits
*Desirable Experience*
* Prior experience in a telecoms, VoIP, or UC service provider environment
* Understanding of real-time media workloads (SIP, RTP) and what they demand from infrastructure
* Database operations experience (PostgreSQL or similar) in production
* Networking fundamentals sufficient to work effectively alongside a carrier-grade network team
* CI/CD pipeline design and developer platform experience
*Working Style*
* Hands-on, methodical, and reliable in live production environments
* Calm, decisive, and accountable under pressure
* Strong ownership mindset - you see problems through to resolution and write down what you learned
* Collaborative with network, service, and development teams
* Comfortable owning a domain end to end in a small senior team
*Working Hours & Holiday*
_Working Hours_
08:30 to 17:30. This is a senior role with autonomy and accountability. We value outcomes, ownership, and effective time management over clock-watching. Out-of-hours support is required on a planned and escalation basis.
_Holiday_
* 21 days annual leave
* Birthday day off
* Bank holidays
*Benefits*
* Company events
* Company pension
* Office canteen & games zone
* Cycle to work scheme
* Discounted or free food
* Employee discount
* Health & wellbeing programme
* On-site parking
* Private medical insurance
* Referral programme
* Work from home (as part of agreed hybrid pattern)
Job Type: Full-time
Pay: £55,000.00-£75,000.00 per year
Benefits:
* Canteen
* Company pension
* Cycle to work scheme
* On-site parking
* Private medical insurance
* Work from home
Experience:
* Kubernetes: 2 years (required)
* CEPH: 2 years (required)
* Proxmox: 2 years (required)
Willingness to travel:
* 75% (required)
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Southampton SO14
Languages
- English
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