Lead Engineer

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Summary

The Lead Engineer is a proficient level engineer with expertise in at least two areas of IT engineering (such as Application, Devops Cloud, etc)

The role involves technically leading a cross functional team building and delivering business outcomes through software. The role involves activities such as:

• Designing, building, testing, deploying and supporting software using agile and DevOps practises
• Building, configuring, and supporting the route to production facilitated through automated CI / CD pipelines
• Developing and supporting the environments up to and including production
• Improving the reliability and quality of the software solutions

The Lead Engineer supports the Engineering Practice Lead to adopt best practice into their assigned engineering team

What You'll Do

Solution Development

• Technical Leads fully participate in the development of applications and tools. They are hands-on on all types of development tasks, commit code, review code, and release code to production. They are assigned to one team and work closely with their fellow engineers, product owner, engineering manager, and other colleagues

Technical Progress Accountability

• Lead engineers are accountable for ensuring the engineering team (or a specific technology area within the team) is constantly up-to-date and efficient in its technical practices and processes. They lead efforts and initiatives to constantly promote, trial, and adopt new tools and practices for the benefit of the engineering team.

Create Learning and Training Resources

• As technical leads in the engineering team, they are responsible for creating learning and training resources for the benefit of the team proactively turning everything they learn into learning materials for the team including teams chats, yammer posts, training, pairing and show and tell sessions.

DevOps Delivery

• Lead engineers help the team develop and implement DevOps practices, balancing build and run responsibilities, removing technical debt and making their applications more automated and reliable over time through removal of toil.

Maintaining Standards

• Lead Engineers ensure the team work within organisational guardrails and meet engineering standards and best practice. They are responsible for the quality of applications in their eco-system.

Who You Are

Lead Engineers are expected to have expertise in at least two of the following areas of Engineering practices

Core skills

• Automation including Testing
• Possess strong teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills to ensure they can collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and bring out better results.
• Security Best Practices: Awareness of security principles and best practices to ensure secure software delivery and infrastructure management.
• Continuous Learning: Keeping up-to-date with the rapidly evolving technologies and trends in the industry.
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Ability to set up monitoring and logging solutions and troubleshoot issues effectively.
• Strong experience working within an agile development methodology
• Excellent time and self-management through effective planning & prioritisation of tasks.
• Proven and demonstrable engineering capability

Devops Engineer

• Scripting and Programming Languages: DevOps Engineers should be highly proficient in the scripting languages like Powershell, Python, Ruby, Bash, and programming languages like C# for automating tasks and creating tools.
• CI/CD Tools: Experience with CI/CD tools such as Azure Devops, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, to set up automated build, test, and deployment pipelines.
• Cloud Platforms: They should be familiar with cloud platforms Azure and to a lesser extent GCP and AWS. As a result, they can deploy and manage cloud-based services.
• Configuration Management: Understanding of configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to manage and maintain infrastructure and application configurations.
• Containers and Container Orchestration: Another key skill required is the knowledge of containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes
• Collaboration and Communication: Furthermore, one should also possess strong teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills. So they can collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and bring out better results.

Cloud Engineer

• Cloud Platform Expertise: In-depth knowledge of Microsoft Azure and to a lesser extent GCP and AWS
• Networking Skills: Understanding of networking concepts, such as TCP/IP, VPN, VPC, and knowledge of cloud-specific networking services.
• Security Knowledge: Familiarity with cloud security best practices, identity and access management (IAM), and encryption techniques.
• Automation and Scripting: Proficiency in scripting languages like Python, PowerShell, or Bash, and experience with configuration management tools.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Hands-on experience with IaC tools like Bicep, Arm, Terraform or Azure Resource Manager templates.
• Cloud Migration: Experience migrating on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and understanding the challenges involved.

Site Reliability Engineer

• Proficient in at least one coding language.
• Well versed in CICD
• Deep understanding of distributed computing, operating systems and databases
• Automation and Scripting: Proficiency in scripting languages like Python, PowerShell, or Bash, and experience with configuration management tools.
• Experience working with cloud native solutions
• Experience automating manual tasks and reducing toil

Qualifications

• Degree level IT or technical/scientific subject. Or alternatively demonstrable experience working at this level
• Technical qualifications advantageous

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that's regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you'll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with, income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance. We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How we work at Canada Life

Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us. We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures. Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others. Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward.

We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That's why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion

Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us. We are proud of the progress we're making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus.

"At Canada Life we believe in the power of great people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives coming together to build better futures. Emerging talent is crucial to our growth and creating an environment that continues to inspire us all." Nick Harding, Chief People Officer, Canada Life UK

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for.