Job Summary
Senior DevOps & Automation Engineer Job Title: Senior DevOps & Automation Engineer Function: Engineering & Test Centre of Excellence (E&T CoE) Reports To: Head of Environment Management Services Grade/Level: Purpose: Senior Bank of Ireland is seeking a hands-on Senior Automation Engineer to own and modernise our pre-production and proving environments. This is an automation-first role with a strong troubleshooting focus . Approximately 50% of the role will be dedicated to building, enhancing and maintaining automation capabilities, while 40% will focus on diagnosing and resolving complex deployment, environment and platform issues. The successful candidate will be the engineer others escalate to when deployments fail, environments become unstable, or recurring operational issues impact delivery. They will be expected to investigate issues across applications, middleware, infrastructure and deployment tooling, identify the root cause, and implement permanent automated solutions. Working alongside an experienced SME and the Service Delivery Manager, this role will help reduce operational risk, increase automation adoption, improve deployment reliability, and drive continuous service improvement. Pre-production environments are treated with the same operational discipline, governance, and urgency as production services.
Key Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities Service Ownership Lead investigation of deployment failures and environment issues. Troubleshoot across application, middleware, operating system, network and infrastructure layers. Perform deep root-cause analysis and implement permanent corrective actions. Analyse pipeline failures, logs, monitoring data and infrastructure events. Support critical releases and major incidents. Ensure recurring issues are resolved through engineering improvements rather than operational workarounds. Automation & Engineering Design, build and maintain automation using Ansible, Python, Terraform and Jenkins. Systematically identify manual tasks and eliminate them. Build reusable, self-service capability so teams can unblock themselves. Drive Infrastructure as Code adoption across the pre-production and Proving estate. Automation & Continuous Improvement Partner with the existing SME to capture and automate manual processes. Share knowledge and promote automation best practices. Build trust through small, visible wins before large-scale change. Escalate constructively where adoption stalls; do not work around people. Engineering Excellence Improve monitoring, logging and operational visibility. Standardise deployment processes across platforms. Contribute to platform modernisation (OpenShift, containers, cloud). Improve documentation, operational procedures and service standa
Skill Requirements
Required Experience & Skills Must Have (non-negotiable — screen out if absent) Requirement 1 2 3 4 Demonstrable deep troubleshooting and root-cause-analysis capability under pressure Strong hands-on Ansible , Terraform and Python scripting Terraform / Infrastructure as Code Git / GitHub / GitLab and branching workflows 5 6 Jenkins pipeline administration and development Solid Linux Should Have administration (Windows awareness acceptable) Requirement 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 5+ years supporting enterprise applications or platforms Release and deployment management practice Containers — ECS or OpenShift/Kubernetes Cloud — AWS (Azure/GCP acceptable) Enterprise-scale, regulated environment experience Monitoring and observability tooling certificates knowledge (SSL/MTLS) Experience in critical production or pre-production environments Proven record of replacing manual processes with automation Evidence of influencing/upskilling colleagues resistant to change Troubleshoot across application, application tiers, network and infrastructure layers. Nice to Have (differentiators, not screening criteria) # 1 2 3 Requirement Financial services / regulated sector background Security and compliance automation DORA metrics implementation
Other Requirements
Agentic AI (Advantageous) The ideal candidate will have exposure to, or hands-on experience with: Candidate Profile We are looking for someone who: Designing and implementing Agentic AI solutions. AI-assisted operational automation. Intelligent workflow orchestration. AI-driven incident management and remediation. AI-enabled deployment validation and control frameworks. Leveraging Generative AI technologies to improve engineering productivity and governance. Runs toward broken things. Enjoys diagnosing what nobody else can. Has a genuine automation-first instinct — manual repetition visibly bothers them. Can bring sceptical colleagues along without alienating them. Thinks strategically but stays hands-on and delivery focused. Communicates clearly with technical and non-technical audiences. Takes ownership without waiting to be asked.