Jobs at Widgit Software

With a passion for symbols and inclusive communication, Widgit has pioneered educational software for over 40 years. As market and technology leaders of symbol-based software products, we have exciting plans for continued expansion – both in the UK and overseas.

Current Vacancies

  • Open close DevOps Engineer

    Job Purpose

    The DevOps Engineer will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining robust, scalable cloud infrastructure for Widgit's SaaS applications, with initial focus on improving reliability and scalability of the existing Widgit Online platform. This will then be followed by architecting and deploying the next-generation technology (‘Yonder’).

    Working with Development, Product and QA in an agile team to deliver a roadmap of features for a new platform of services, this role will ensure reliable service delivery during peak periods, maintain high performance and security, optimise AWS costs, and establish infrastructure-as-code practices that support the company's growth.

    Main Duties

    Product Development

    • Managing the AWS workload: Prioritising and managing tasks generated by product development.
    • Member of the agile team: Taking part in Sprint ceremonies, daily stand-ups, product design, and review sessions.
    • Sprint work tracking: Tracking infrastructure work as Jira tickets, consistent with development work management.

    Development

    • Working with Development/QA team: Joining weekly design and architecture meetings to influence decisions with infrastructure knowledge.
    • Working with QA: Automating testing as part of deployment pipelines.
    • Monitoring and leading on live issue resolutions: Leading on the monitoring of live systems, organising responses when issues arise.

    Infrastructure Management

    • Widgit Online infrastructure: Auditing, documenting, and improving reliability of the existing Widgit Online infrastructure, investigating and resolving load bottlenecks.
    • Infrastructure as code: Managing all new infrastructure using Terraform, maintaining configurations in version control and creating reusable modules.
    • Multi-service maintenance: Maintaining infrastructure for all services including Widgit Online, Yonder, API services, and supporting infrastructure.
    • Deployment pipelines: Reviewing, validating, and updating deployment pipelines, facilitating zero-downtime deployments and automating across environments where possible.
    • Container management: Reviewing and maintaining containerised services, ensuring best practices are followed.

    Platform Development

    • Yonder infrastructure: Designing and implementing scalable infrastructure for Yonder, setting up Terraform configurations, ensuring auto-scaling capabilities, and configuring S3 storage.
    • Database management: Ensuring proper backup procedures and performance tuning for relational databases.
    • System integration: Maintaining integrations with external services.

    Security and Operations

    • Security best practices: Implementing and maintaining security best practices across the stack, reviewing penetration testing results, maintaining Cloudflare configuration, and ensuring encryption and access controls.
    • Cost management: Tracking AWS spend, reviewing expensive services, and identifying cost optimisation opportunities.
    • Performance optimisation: Maintaining change logs, optimising performance, tuning caching strategies, and conducting load testing before peak periods.
    • Backup and disaster recovery: Ensuring backup procedures are in place, maintaining contingency planning, and managing data retention policies.

    Monitoring and Reliability

    • Alerting and monitoring: Maintaining alerts and monitoring systems, ensuring proactive issue detection.
    • Incident response: Responding to infrastructure issues, leading post-mortem reviews, and maintaining uptime statistics.
    • Knowledge sharing: Upskilling team members in DevOps practices, document processes, and procedures.

    Team Collaboration

    • Working with Technical Infrastructure team: Collaborating with the Systems Administrator, providing guidance on DevOps practices, and reviewing Terraform configurations.
    • Proactive communication: Maintaining regular communication with team heads (HoSD, HoTI, Product) to keep stakeholders informed of progress, blockers, and strategic infrastructure decisions.

    Person Specification

    Skills and knowledge

    Essential

    • AWS expertise: Auto-scaling, EC2, ELB, S3, RDS, VPC, ECS and Fargate, pricing structures, best practice.
    • Infrastructure-as-code: Ideally Terraform.
    • Networking and CDN: Cloudflare, VPC design, load balancers.
    • Containerisation: Docker best practices.
    • Deployment: Best practice deployment pipelines.
    • Relational databases: Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL), performance tuning, and optimisation.
    • Caching: Elastic cache options including Redis.
    • Regional Deployment: Multi-region deployments
    • Linux System Administration: Ubuntu/Linux server management, monitoring, troubleshooting, security hardening.

    Desirable

    • Windows server experience
    • Mixed-platform deployment
    • Automated testing
    • Ruby on Rails deployments
    • Background job processing (Sidekiq/Redis)

    If this sounds like you and you like the sound of us and what we stand for, please email your CV and covering letter to our Head of People and Culture, Jessica Ward at jobs@widgit.com

    Download the Job Description

    Download the Candidate Pack

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Regardless of the role, we’re always keen to hear from like-minded individuals as we continue to grow our team.

Send in your CV and an overview of yourself to jobs@widgit.com, and we’ll reach out if we have something available in the next 3 months.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental to who we are at Widgit. We’re proud to nurture a culture that embraces all walks of life – with staff joining us from university through to retirement age.

From embracing disability and neurodiversity to championing female voices within our leadership team, we’re mindful of diversity when seeking new talent – ensuring everyone feels empowered to reach their full potential.

See our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Statement.

Meet the people behind the symbols: our team of Widgiteers, by learning Who we are

Find out more About Widgit.

Our Home in Warwickshire

We believe the right environment makes better work possible. Our Warwickshire office reflects just that: a space that is inclusive, creative and built for collaboration. It is where ideas grow, resources take shape and our team comes together to make it all happen.

With a recent expansion, the office now includes dedicated spaces for focused work, quiet time and collaboration – all in a bright, welcoming setting that supports the way we work best.