devops engineer in life reinsurance

Pacific Life Re is a global life reinsurance company undergoing a major back-office transformation. Its Divisional Data Team develops and manages an enterprise-wide data solution, reporting services, and data governance practices.

• Own the Azure DevOps organisation and project configuration for the Divisional Data Team, including projects, teams, security groups, service connections, variable groups and secure files;
• Administer permissions and access models across repositories, pipelines, artefacts and libraries;
• Manage build agents, including self-hosted agent pools, capacity, scaling and patching;
• Use Azure Boards to plan, track and report DevOps work and integrate work items with commits, pull requests and releases;
• Manage Azure Artifacts feeds, package versioning and retention policies;
• Define, document and enforce branching strategies, naming conventions and promotion paths;
• Set and maintain branch policies, approval workflows, build validation and merge strategies;
• Own the pull request process, including review standards and approval routing;
• Define release branching, tagging, versioning, hotfix and emergency fix processes;
• Maintain merge conflict resolution, rebase, cherry-pick and rollback standards;
• Create, structure and maintain repositories, documentation requirements and repository standards;
• Manage repository security, protected branches, forks and cross-repository dependencies;
• Implement and maintain pre-commit and pre-merge quality gates;
• Manage repository hygiene, retention, archiving and repository migration;
• Prevent secrets and credentials from being committed to source control through scanning and remediation;
• Design, build and maintain YAML-based CI/CD pipelines for Snowflake SQL, dbt models, Streamlit applications, stored procedures and supporting scripts;
• Own database change management and operate state-based deployment across development, SIT, UAT and production;
• Maintain reproducible environments and infrastructure-as-code across environments;
• Implement automated testing, deployment gates, approvals and post-deployment validation;
• Ensure rollback and recovery mechanisms for failed deployments;
• Own the end-to-end release calendar and release process for the data platform;
• Coordinate with delivery, testing and business stakeholders;
• Chair or represent the team at change advisory and release approval forums;
• Prepare and submit change records, including ECRs, with appropriate evidence;
• Manage release readiness, environment lock-downs, dependencies and go/no-go decisions;
• Maintain an auditable release trail linking requirements, code, approvals and deployments;
• Conduct post-implementation reviews and drive improvements in deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore;
• Own RBAC design and administration across Snowflake and Azure DevOps;
• Implement and maintain data masking and PII controls;
• Manage certificate renewals, artefact repository configuration and remediation of security scanning findings;
• Embed IT controls and Business Control compliance requirements into delivery and release processes;
• Collaborate with data engineering, testing, reporting, architecture and IT infrastructure teams.

• Deep hands-on expertise with Azure DevOps, including Repos, YAML Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, self-hosted agents and service connections;
• Expert-level Git skills covering branching strategies, branch policies, pull request workflows, tagging, versioning, merging, rebasing, cherry-picking and rollback;
• Strong experience designing and running automated production deployment pipelines in controlled and audited environments;
• Demonstrable release management experience, including change control, release governance and stakeholder coordination;
• Experience with database change management tooling and state-based deployment approaches;
• Strong knowledge of Snowflake administration, RBAC, masking policies and cost/performance optimisation;
• Experience with dbt and SQL in a modern cloud data warehouse environment;
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, PowerShell, Bash or Python scripting, and monitoring and alerting tools;
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders;
• Appropriate technical skill for the role and awareness of current issues affecting the profession and the life reinsurance industry;
• Responsibility for the quality, completeness and accuracy of own work and the team’s work;
• Ability to prioritise competing requests and deadlines;
• Ability to provide accurate and timely status updates and escalate issues appropriately;
• Open, fair and collaborative approach to sharing information, knowledge and experience;
• Clear and practical verbal and written communication without over-reliance on technical language;
• Ability to challenge existing practices and evaluate current ways of working critically;
• Flexibility and resourcefulness in a changing environment with challenging deadlines;
• Ability to work effectively with people with diverse skills and experience;
• Agile approach and ability to think ahead and focus on the end goal;
• Nice to have: Understanding of networking, certificates and security scanning tools, knowledge of reinsurance or insurance industry concepts.

• 25 Days of annual leave with the option to buy or sell additional days;
• Adoption and fertility leave;
• Enhanced parental leave;
• Private insurance coverage for the employee and dependents;
• Group Life Insurance coverage of 9x basic annual salary;
• Group Income Protection up to 75% of basic annual salary;
• Optical benefits;
• 15% Combined employee/employer savings and retirement contributions;
• Subsidised gym membership;
• Employee Assistance Program;
• Cycle to Work and Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme;
• Time off for volunteering;
• Charitable matching of employee donations;
• Team building days, social activities and wellbeing initiatives;
• Benefits apply only to permanent and fixed-term employees.