Dev Ops Engineer

Who Are We?

Smarkets is transforming the betting exchange space by delivering world-class technology and the best-priced markets in the industry. With over £29 billion in traded volume since 2010, we’ve built a product-led, transparent, and fair platform that challenges the norms of traditional betting.

As a Series B tech company, we pride ourselves on engineering excellence, lean product thinking, and scientific rigor. With a close-knit team and a passion for innovation, Smarkets is where top talent comes to make a real impact.

Now, we’re looking for a DevOps Engineer to help scale our infrastructure and empower our developers with streamlined, self-service tooling and operational excellence.

About the Role

You’ll join the DevOps Infrastructure Team, responsible for real-time distributed systems that power our trading engine-systems that are always-on, ultra-low latency, and demand resilience at scale.

You won’t just be building infrastructure-you’ll be crafting platform capabilities to streamline how engineers build, test, deploy, and run applications across our hybrid estate of self-hosted, co-located hardware and AWS cloud.

This is a role where infrastructure meets engineering productivity: part DevOps, part Platform, 100% mission-critical.

What You’ll Do

• Platform Enablement: Design and maintain internal tooling and workflows that improve the developer experience across deployment pipelines, observability and testing environments.
• Empower Developers (DevEx): Automate workflows, streamline CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab), and ensure fast, safe, and reliable deployments across environments.
• Infrastructure Automation: Build, manage, and scale Kubernetes-based microservices infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code best practices.
• Developer Experience: Collaborate closely with product engineers to provide reliable, low-friction paths for development, testing, and deployment.
• Operational Excellence: Monitor, debug, and ensure the stability of our systems with robust alerting and logging using Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK.
• System Reliability: Optimize performance and availability for high-throughput, low-latency services that power the betting exchange.
• Collaborative Delivery: Participate in on-call rotations, incident reviews, and cross-functional projects with engineering and SRE teams.
• Security & Compliance: Contribute to secure system design and operational practices that support industry-standard compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc).

What You Bring

• 2–4 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles.
• Strong Linux systems administration background.
• Proficiency in Python and Bash scripting.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS (or other public clouds).
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and production-scale deployment.
• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and a passion for improving the build/deploy process.
• A pragmatic mindset that balances ideal solutions with immediate business needs.
• Curiosity and initiative to explore new technologies and bring fresh thinking into the team.

Bonus Points For

• Exposure to Nix-based Build environments.
• Understanding of self-hosted or hybrid infrastructure models.
• Experience with ArgoCD, Backstage or internal developer portals.
• Knowledge of Rust or C++ environments.
• Interest in performance engineering and low-latency systems.

Our Stack

• Languages: Python, Bash, Rust, NodeJS
• Datastores: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Nix, Jenkins, GitLab CI
• Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Sentry

Our Values

• Push to win
• Make others better
• Give a shit
• Be a pro
• Bring the energy

Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what’s expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us.

Benefits

We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard.

We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development.

These include:

• Stock options which vests over 4 years
• Pension scheme - an impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same
• Health insurance
• Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee and soft drinks also included)
• We're a member of a cycle to work scheme
• We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training
• 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year!
• Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home
• 20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year
• We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don't need to worry about what to make or buy for lunch as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in-house chef Alex!

What happens next

We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around.

• CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible
• HackerRank Exercise - At home test to show off your skills
• Let’s chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role
• Technical Interview - Live Technical Interview + Experience and Mindset Chat
• In Office Interview - Lunch with other colleagues in the team + LT Chat