Senior TechOps Engineer Contract

Working at CreateFuture CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years. CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today. About the role and team: We are looking for TechOps Engineers to operate, stabilise and modernise our Azure-hosted platforms (Java/Spring Boot microservices on RHEL). The role covers 24/7 operations, incident management, hands-on troubleshooting and security remediation, and helps build out a codified platform: Terraform, GitHub Actions + Ansible, and centralised ELK. Key responsibilities • Build and support environments on Azure; hands-on RHEL administration (hardening, patching, tuning) • Act as escalation for L2/L3 incidents, driving RCA and permanent fixes • Debug issues hands-on across the stack (OS, network, middleware, JVM, database) using logs, metrics, thread/heap dumps and packet captures • Support Java/Spring Boot microservices and the middleware they run on; diagnose JVM issues (memory, GC, threads, latency) • Drive security vulnerability remediation across OS, middleware and cloud platform • Collaborate with Security/SOC/NOC on incident response and post-incident reviews • Deliver changes as code: infrastructure in Terraform, deployments via GitHub Actions running Ansible • Own backup, restore testing and DR failover readiness • Participate in regular 24/7 on-call rotation • Manage incidents/problems/changes via Jira Service Management • Maintain runbooks, dashboards and documentation • Work with development and Platform team to take ownership of an inherited Azure estate, stabilise it, then modernise it with AI-assisted & reviewed tooling Technical skills • Cloud/Network: Azure VMs, VNet, NSG, Load Balancer, App Gateway/WAF, Firewall, Virtual WAN, Key Vault, private endpoints, VPN; Azure Front Door, Cloudflare, Nginx, TLS • Data: Azure MySQL Flexible Server (HA, replicas, point-in-time restore), Redis, Blob Storage; Canal (MySQL CDC), MongoDB • OS: RHEL (enterprise production), Azure Update Manager; Docker engine on hosts • Java/Middleware: Spring Boot, Dubbo, Nacos, ZooKeeper, XXL-Job, Kafka, RabbitMQ • Observability: Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch cluster ops, ILM, Logstash, Kibana); Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Azure Monitor; Micrometer/JVM observability; PagerDuty • Access/Security: Entra ID, RBAC, PIM; Azure Bastion, JumpServer (PAM), Zscaler ZPA • Backup/DR: Azure Backup, DR region failover • IaC/CI/CD: Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible, GitHub Packages, GitOps; Python, Bash • Tooling: Jira Service Management, Confluenc Requirements • 8+ years in TechOps/Infrastructure/SRE/Production Operations • Strong hands-on Azure and RHEL experience in production • Proven support of Java microservices/middleware in production • Strong hands-on debugging and analytical skills; comfortable working an unfamiliar problem from symptoms to root cause • Advanced Elasticsearch and JVM observability skills • Hands-on Terraform, GitHub Actions and Ansible; Python/Bash scripting • Strong incident management/RCA capability; IT