Job Title
DevOps (Technical Release Engineer)
Location
Hammersmith, Watford, Greater London, Hertfordshire
Responsibilities
- Define, author, and maintain the master Technical Cutover Runbook, detailing minute by minute technical tasks, owners, dependencies, and estimated durations.
- Plan and lead rehearsal and dress rehearsal "dry runs" to stress test the runbook, identify gaps, and refine time estimates.
- Ensure business readiness: track end user training, operational workarounds during downtime, and helpdesk readiness.
- Design comprehensive, deterministic rollback and contingency plans for every stage of the cutover process.
- Facilitate formal Go/No Go checkpoint meetings with technical leads, project teams, and key stakeholders during the cutover window.
- Maintain environment synchronization across staging, pre production, and production; audit and reconcile configuration, data schemas, and security policies.
- Coordinate with Release Engineers to ensure correct software versions, third party dependencies, and patches are uniformly deployed.
- Automate manual cutover steps into CI/CD pipelines and implement automated post deployment smoke tests and health checks.
- Lead the Technical Command Centre during live cutover windows, directing engineers, DBAs, and sysadmins.
- Act as the central communication hub, translating complex technical status updates into clear, business focused impacts for executive stakeholders.
- Partner with Data Engineers to execute delta data migrations, schema updates, and data validation scripts during the cutover window.
- Maintain a cutover specific risk register with pre approved mitigation strategies for likely technical or operational bottlenecks.
Technical Proficiency
- Hands on experience managing infrastructure state changes during live cutovers.
- Strong knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including traffic routing, load balancers, and CDN caching.
- Understanding of data migration tools, database schema deployment, and data replication/synchronization techniques.
- Experience with Kubernetes or Docker environments; managing Helm charts or Kustomize for multi environment deployments.
- Proficient in at least one programming language: JavaScript, Python, Java, Groovy, TypeScript, or C++.
- Deep expertise with CI/CD tools (e.g., GitHub Actions) and deployment automation.
- Solid grasp of SQL/NoSQL databases, schema migration tools (Liquibase, Flyway), and data replication strategies.
- Experience with Git workflow models (GitFlow, Trunk Based Development, Feature Branching) and merge conflict resolution.
Requirements, Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- Minimum 3-5 years of hands on experience in a technical release engineering environment.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.
- Understanding of modern application architectures: monolithic, microservices, and distributed systems.
- Familiarity with deployment topologies, dependency management, and zero downtime deployment strategies.
- Knowledge of infrastructure as code and environment promotion strategies.
Preferred Competencies
- Calm under pressure; proven ability to make critical, time sensitive decisions during high stress deployment windows.
- Meticulous organisational and detail oriented focus on task tracking and resource availability.
- Cross functional diplomacy: ability to command respect and direct actions across engineering, DBA, product, and testing teams.
- Availability to work non standard hours (nights and weekends) during scheduled cutovers.
- Clear communication: ability to translate complex technical blockers into concise status updates for non technical stakeholders.
Mandatory Skills
- Cloud Engineering experience with AWS.