DevOps Engineer
Lightning Fibre
Up to to £60,000.00 depending on experience
DevOps Engineer
Lightning Fibre is recruiting a DevOps Engineer to join the Network Development team in Polegate. The salary for this role will depend on your experience.
Why This Role is Different
This is not a large-enterprise DevOps position where you are one of many engineers in a silo. At Lightning Fibre you will:
Be the go-to DevOps/SRE expert in the company
Work in a small team where your impact is highly visible
Own problems end-to-end and proactively improve systems
Thrive in an environment with autonomy and responsibility
Candidates whose experience has been exclusively in large, highly-siloed enterprise environments may find this role unsuitable. We are seeking a self-starter who thrives in smaller, fast-moving companies.
How to Apply
Please submit your CV and a covering letter. Applications without a covering letter will not be considered.
Your covering letter should explain
Why you are suited to working in a small company environment
Examples of times you have worked independently and taken ownership
How your sysadmin background equips you to succeed in our FreeBSD/Linux environment
Lightning Fibre was established in 2018. We are a leading local alternative network provider of full fibre broadband in East Sussex. We are headquartered in Polegate and have an existing broadband network in East Sussex. Our broadband network can supply our standard installed customers with anything up to 10 Gigabits in both download and uploads.
We are a community-oriented network operator, whose aim is to significantly upgrade our region’s broadband infrastructure, providing local jobs and keeping local money in the areas we serve. We are a vital enabler to grow our digital local economy, thereby creating further quality jobs. Lightning Fibre has bold plans for growth and development.
The role primary purpose:
The DevOps engineer will ensure that Lightning Fibre’s internal systems, applications, and monitoring platforms run reliably, securely, and efficiently. The role focuses on managing and automating our FreeBSD and Linux virtual machines, all hosted on a private cloud infrastructure, as well as enabling better tooling and automation across the company.
This is a hands-on, independent role. You will be the company’s dedicated DevOps/SRE engineer, working closely with our development team and NOC. You will often be working autonomously, owning problems end-to-end and proactively improving systems without waiting for someone to assign you a task.
A key responsibility is maintaining and enhancing the logging, monitoring and alerting platforms that collect status and performance data from both our core network and customer connections. This enables the business to proactively identify and respond to issue, while giving Customer/Tech Support, Network and delivery teams the information they need.
This role also drives automation and operational visibility across the company, from deployments to and status pages to Jira/Confluence workflow automation, and future use of private AI/ML models that help spot anomalies and patterns in large volumes of operational data.
Ultimately this role helps us deliver a more resilient network and a smoother customer experience by ensuring that our systems and processes scale with the company’s growth.
Key task and responsibilities:
Maintain and optimise our FreeBSD and Debian/Ubuntu virtual machines
Own our monitoring and observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, etc.)
Implement, refine, and support CI/CD pipelines for bespoke internal applications
Develop infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Ansible) to improve repeatability and reduce manual intervention
Automate system administration tasks, deployments, and updates
Troubleshoot production issues and participate in on-call rotation
Work with development and project teams to design and implement operational requirements from the ground up
Ensure system security patching, and compliance with internal policies
Requirements:
Essential skills:-
Proven experience in a DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Systems Administration role
Strong experience with FreeBSD and Debian Linux
Solid understanding of virtualisation and private cloud platforms (e.g. Proxmore, VMware)
Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, or Chef)
Experience with monitoring and logging stacks (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, or equivalents)
Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Perl, Python, or similar)
Strong troubleshooting skills across systems, networks, and applications
Understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls)
Demonstrable ability to work independently, manage your own workload, and take ownership of tasks without constant direction
Desirable skills:-
Infrastructure-as-Code experience
Experience integrating bespoke or legacy applications into automated workflows
Familiarity with CI/CD tools (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
Knowledge of secure system design and hardening practices
FreeRadius administration or integration experience
Understanding of TR-069 / TR-181 / TR-369 for CPE device management
Experience with Jira/Confluence automation
Exposure to private AI/ML tooling for anomaly detection or data analysis at scale
How to Apply
Please submit your CV and a covering letter. Applications without a covering letter will not be considered.
Your covering letter should explain
Why you are suited to working in a small company environment
Examples of times you have worked independently and taken ownership
How your sysadmin background equips you to succeed in our FreeBSD/Linux environment
