Senior DevOps Engineer (with Systems Administration)
Salary £ Up to 65,000 + On call compensation
Hertford, UK
Vacancy listed 18/05/2026
Application deadline 18/08/2026
Details
We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer / Systems Administrator to play a key role in shaping, maintaining, and evolving Zoocha’s cloud infrastructure and internal systems estate.

This is a DevOps-first role with responsibility for both hands-on delivery and technical ownership across hosting platforms, CI/CD, and other internal systems. You will ensure that Zoocha’s infrastructure is secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned with best practice, while contributing to the ongoing evolution of our platform, tooling, and operational processes.

You will operate as a senior member of the DevOps team, taking ownership of critical systems, leading improvements, and supporting less experienced team members.

You will also play a key role in evolving Zoocha’s use of AI-enabled tooling across DevOps and engineering workflows, ensuring that AI is used safely, effectively, and in alignment with our governance standards.

Why we are hiring
As Zoocha continues to grow, the scale and complexity of our hosting platforms, operational tooling, and engineering workflows continues to increase. We are looking to strengthen the DevOps department with a senior engineer who can take ownership of key clients, contribute to strategic initiatives, and help evolve our overall DevOps capability as the organisation grows.

This role will help rebalance client and operational responsibilities across the team. By introducing additional senior DevOps Engineer / Systems Administrator capacity, we can ensure that operational responsibilities such as infrastructure provisioning, internal systems administration, and day-to-day DevOps activities are consistently owned and delivered, while maintaining momentum on platform evolution, security improvements, automation, and broader strategic initiatives.

The role also supports the wider strategic direction of the DevOps team by enabling continued investment in automation, security, developer experience, infrastructure consistency, and operational scalability across the organisation.

About Zoocha
Founded in 2009, Zoocha is a leading Drupal specialist digital agency based in the UK, with offices in Spain and Brazil. Over 80 passionate thinkers, makers, and doers working across a range of disciplines including UX, strategy, design, development, hosting, project management, and support. We’re a friendly, lively, and fast-paced place to work, with regular team nights out and a wide range of social events on offer across our three offices – and we’re a certified Great Place to Work, too.

We’re certified in ISO 27001, ISO 27701, Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus, ICO, ISO 9001, ISO 22301, FSQS, JOSCAR, ISO 14001 and are Carbon Neutral Britain certified.

Our work and clients
We build long-lasting, collaborative relationships with clients and push them, ourselves, and the world around us forward through the work we do together.

With over 50 Drupal clients, our work is varied, but we have a focus on the not-for-profit, government, education, and travel sectors. Current clients include:
  • University College London
  • University of Portsmouth
  • Alzheimer’s Society
  • Oxfam
  • Topdeck Travel
  • Visit Valencia
  • Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
  • Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust
  • United Nations 
  • Ofsted

The Role/Your Remit
As a Senior DevOps Engineer / Systems Administrator at Zoocha, your remit is to take ownership of a defined set of operational infrastructure and hosting responsibilities that support both Zoocha’s client-delivery platforms and its internal business operations. The role is DevOps-first, with a smaller, clearly bounded proportion of time spent on internal systems administration such as device management, SaaS administration, and local infrastructure.

You will be expected to contribute both operationally and strategically, balancing day-to-day platform ownership with continuous improvement initiatives across infrastructure, deployment workflows, monitoring, automation, resilience, and developer experience.

As a senior member of the DevOps department, you will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, technical judgement, and accountability. You will contribute to technical decision-making, support operational maturity across the team, and help drive improvements to platform consistency, resilience, documentation, automation, and operational processes as Zoocha continues to scale.

You will also play an active role in supporting Zoocha’s wider governance, security, and compliance objectives, including operational alignment with our ISO-certified Business Management Systems, and the continued evolution of AI-enabled tooling and engineering workflows across the organisation.

Key areas of responsibility

The following areas describe typical examples of where you’ll spend your time and what you’ll be responsible for day to day.

1. DevOps and Infrastructure Operations (Primary Focus)

  • Taking ownership of defined operational infrastructure, hosting, and CI/CD responsibilities across Zoocha’s client and internal platforms, working collaboratively as part of the wider DevOps team.
  • Managing infrastructure provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and operational support activities across cloud-hosted environments and associated tooling.
  • Maintaining reliable, repeatable, and secure operational processes through the use of automation, infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, and standardised workflows.
  • Monitoring infrastructure health and alerts, responding to operational issues appropriately, and escalating or coordinating wider investigation where required.
  • Leading or contributing to operational incident investigation, troubleshooting, and resolution activities across infrastructure and hosting platforms.
  • Supporting operational resilience through effective documentation, knowledge sharing, process improvement, and reduction of single points of dependency.
  • Contributing to the ongoing evolution of Zoocha’s infrastructure standards, operational tooling, and hosting platform capabilities.

2. CI/CD, Tooling and Platform Support

  • Managing, supporting and improving Zoocha’s CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, and associated operational platforms.
  • Supporting reliable and consistent deployment workflows across development, staging, and production environments.
  • Investigating and resolving infrastructure, deployment, and pipeline-related issues across client and internal platforms.
  • Contributing to improvements in deployment reliability, operational efficiency, observability, and developer experience.
  • Supporting the ongoing development and maintenance of automation, scripting, and operational tooling used across the DevOps function.
  • Working collaboratively with development and QA teams to improve deployment consistency, release confidence, and platform usability.

3. Monitoring, Security and Operational Readiness

  • Maintaining and improving infrastructure monitoring, alerting, logging, and operational visibility across Zoocha platforms.
  • Supporting operational security activities, including patching, access management, configuration review, vulnerability remediation, and security hardening.
  • Participating in operational incident response, root cause analysis, and service recovery activities in line with established DevOps and Service Desk processes.
  • Supporting operational alignment with Zoocha’s ISO-certified Business Management Systems, including audit readiness, evidence gathering, and compliance related operational controls.
  • Contributing to operational resilience, service continuity, and platform reliability through proactive maintenance and continuous improvement activities.

4. Developer Experience and Continuous Improvement

  • Participating in developer experience (DX) initiatives aimed at improving local development, deployment workflows, and operational tooling.
  • Identifying opportunities to reduce manual effort through automation or improved processes.
  • Contributing to Zoocha Continuous Improvement (ZCI) and Strategic Initiative (ZSI) workstreams where appropriate, particularly those related to DevOps tooling, platforms, or workflows.

5. Systems Administration and Internal IT (Secondary Responsibility)

Depending on team allocation, operational priorities, and individual experience, the role may also include a smaller proportion of internal systems administration responsibilities to support Zoocha’s broader operational and security requirements.
  • Supporting the provisioning and lifecycle management of team member devices using Zoocha’s device management platforms (e.g. JumpCloud, Landscape).
  • Administering internal SaaS platforms, including user access, permissions, and policy management.
  • Managing endpoint security tooling, such as antivirus and endpoint protection platforms.
  • Ensuring device, access, and system changes align with Zoocha’s security, governance, and compliance requirements.
  • Maintaining accurate records and documentation for internal systems and assets.

The exact balance of internal systems administration responsibilities will vary depending on the strengths, experience, and focus areas of the successful candidate, alongside the wider priorities of the DevOps team.

6. Compliance and Business Systems Support (as needed)

  • Supporting operational aspects of Zoocha’s ISO-certified Business Management Systems, including evidence gathering and system checks.
  • Assisting with Cyber Essentials Plus readiness from an operational and tooling perspective.

Expectations
In this role, we expect you to approach your work with a strong sense of ownership, care, and professionalism. You should be comfortable operating within a fast-moving operational environment where reliability, security, consistency, and clear communication with both internal teams and clients are critical to successful service delivery.

You should be confident working within operational environments where reliability, consistency, and security matter as much as technical problem-solving. This includes working effectively from documentation and runbooks, contributing to their ongoing improvement, understanding when escalation is appropriate, and recognising the wider business impact of day-to-day operational work.

A strong security mindset is essential. You will be trusted with access to internal systems, infrastructure, and tooling, and we expect you to handle this access responsibly, follow security controls, and treat sensitive information with care.

You should be proactive in managing your time and priorities, balancing DevOps-focused work with a smaller amount of internal systems administration, while continuing to work collaboratively with the wider DevOps team and contributing positively to operational delivery and continuous improvement initiatives.

You should also be comfortable participating in operational support and on-call responsibilities as part of the wider DevOps team. This includes contributing to incident response, responding appropriately to operational issues within agreed processes, communicating clearly during incidents, and helping maintain reliable service availability across client and internal platforms.

As a senior member of the DevOps department, you will also be expected to contribute positively to the wider operational maturity of the team through knowledge sharing, process improvement, documentation, and collaborative problem-solving.

Success in the role requires a proactive approach, strong organisational skills, attention to detail, and the ability to remain calm and effective when managing operational issues, incidents, competing priorities, or changing business requirements.

Preferred Experience
The following experience and technical exposure would be beneficial for the role:

  • Infrastructure-as-Code tooling, particularly Terraform & Cloudformation
  • CI/CD tooling and deployment automation, particularly GitHub Actions
  • Linux systems administration and troubleshooting within cloud-hosted environments
  • Strong Cloudflare experience, including DNS, WAF, caching, security, and CDN configuration
  • AWS infrastructure and operational experience, with particular emphasis on:
    • Systems Manager (SSM)
    • RDS
    • ECS
    • EC2
    • CloudWatch
    • Bedrock (beneficial but less critical)
  • AI-enabled tooling and operational workflows within engineering or DevOps environments
  • Cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimisation tooling
  • Awareness of Drupal or PHP-based application hosting environments and associated operational considerations


Success Measures / How We’ll Measure Your Impact
Success in this role is measured by reliability, clear ownership, and progression over time. We are not looking for heroics or constant firefighting, but for steady improvements in how operational DevOps and internal systems work day to day.

In the first 3 months
  • You are fully onboarded into Zoocha’s tooling, platforms, and ways of working.
  • Operational work within your remit is delivered consistently and to an appropriate standard, with sensible escalation and collaboration where needed.
  • You are comfortable working from existing documentation and runbooks, while contributing to their ongoing improvement.
  • Documentation and records you interact with are kept accurate and up to date.
  • You are becoming familiar with Zoocha’s operational standards, security controls, deployment workflows, and internal systems landscape.

In the first 6 months
You operate independently across your core operational responsibilities.
  • Ownership of defined systems and clients is clear, predictable, and trusted by the wider DevOps team.
  • Issues are identified early, communicated clearly, and handled with minimal disruption.
  • Documentation and operational processes are improved as a result of hands-on experience.

Over time (ongoing success)
Operational DevOps and internal systems work runs smoothly with clear ownership and fewer repeat issues.
  • Improvements you contribute reduce manual effort, operational risk, platform inconsistency, or deployment friction.
  • You contribute positively to the wider technical capability and operational maturity of the DevOps department through proactive ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
  • Systems remain audit-ready, with evidence, documentation, and controls maintained as part of normal operations.
  • You contribute to operational support and on-call responsibilities, helping distribute operational load effectively across the team.
  • Supporting less experienced team members through collaboration, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

Overall, success in this role means that Zoocha’s infrastructure and operational platforms remain reliable, scalable, secure, and well-managed, while the wider engineering organisation benefits from improved operational maturity, resilience, and efficiency.

Mandatory requirements
  • UK-based and able to work effectively with teams across the UK, Spain and Brazil.
  • Right to work in the UK: candidates must hold a valid visa or work permit.
  • Strong written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate clearly and confidently across all levels of the organisation.
  • Regular access to the Hertford office when needed
  • A commitment to confidentiality, professionalism and ethical handling of potentially sensitive information.
  • No recruitment agencies - direct applications only.


Why work at Zoocha? 
  • Flexible working plus the ability to work from any of our offices (UK, Spain, Brazil) for periods of time.
  • Outstanding benefits including profit share, private healthcare, gym, and wellness fund.
  • Unlimited training budget.
  • An inclusive workplace with active advocacy networks for women, LGBTQI employees, and people from ethnic minorities.
  • Regular team socials and all-inclusive monthly social events. 

Sound like you?
  • No recruitment agencies, please. Applications submitted via agencies will not be considered.
  • Although we strive to provide feedback on all Zoocha applications, if we acknowledge receipt of your application and you do not hear from us again, please note that we will not be moving forward with your candidacy.

We truly appreciate your interest in joining our team and thank you for taking the time to apply.
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Location: UK-based, with the potential for occasional travel to regional offices where required by projects.

Type: Hybrid (with regular time in the Hertford office; typically 3–4 days per week)

Working hours: 09:00-17:30 with flexible working
Benefits

Flexible working plus the ability to work from any of our offices (UK, Spain, Brazil) for periods of time

Outstanding benefits including profit share, private healthcare, gym and wellness fund

An inclusive workplace with active advocacy networks for women, LGBTQI employees and people from ethnic minorities

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