Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

The creative mind behind every project.  Put your skills to the test to build solutions that continue to shape the world we live in. 


About Us    

We are Ascent! and we help our customers solve problems, elevate, and do existing things better. We are on a mission to help our customers connect data, software, and purpose to create extraordinary outcomes. You could say we are a digital transformation business.  
We specialize in software product development, analytics, data science, IoT solutions, machine learning, DevOps optimization, and modernization of applications, data, and platforms.  
We work with incredible clients in all types of industries such as smart home devices, space exploration, beer manufacturing, finance, ecology, and logistics. We work with some of the sharpest minds in the brightest businesses and we employ the sharpest minds too!  
At Ascent, we also believe in fostering a vibrant office community where collaboration thrives and connections flourish. With our hybrid approach, we prioritize hiring individuals who reside in close proximity to our offices. Our aim is to cultivate a positive atmosphere and sense of belonging by facilitating easy access to the office.  


About the role 

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to lead the reimplementation and administration of a self-managed GitLab environment on Microsoft Azure. This role is critical in designing a well-architected, scalable, and secure DevOps platform tailored to the needs of modern engineering teams. You will be responsible for the architecture, deployment, and operational management of GitLab’s self-hosted components, with a strong emphasis on infrastructure-as-code, automation, and native Azure services. Following the successful rollout, you’ll collaborate with engineering teams to support and extend CI/CD workflows, integrating GitLab pipelines and potentially Azure DevOps where appropriate.


Responsibilities

• Design and deploy a self-managed, highly available GitLab architecture on Azure.
• Provision infrastructure using automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Select appropriate Azure-native services for compute, storage, data, and networking.
• Implement backup/restore workflows, storage replication, monitoring, and disaster recovery processes aligned with enterprise RTO/RPO targets.
• Collaborate with network and platform teams to enforce RBAC, logging, and auditing, and SSO/LDAP integration.
• Provide operational documentation and onboarding materials for engineering teams to consume the GitLab platform for CI/CD.
• Assist teams in building and migrating pipelines to GitLab, integrating with container registries, cloud artifacts, and deployment tools.
• Define procedures for patching, version upgrades, and GitLab Runner autoscaling. 

Required skills

• Strong experience managing self-hosted GitLab environments at scale, including service component tuning and service separation.
• Deep knowledge of GitLab’s highly available (HA) architecture, especially Gitaly clusters, Praefect, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq.
• Hands-on Azure experience provisioning and configuring IaaS and PaaS services using Terraform and Ansible.
• Understanding of GitLab CI/CD runner configurations and pipeline security best practices.
• Solid grasp of monitoring, logging, and alerting using Prometheus, Grafana, and Azure Monitor.
• Familiarity with backup and disaster recovery strategies for distributed GitLab components.
• Ability to communicate infrastructure design and risks to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Preferred skills

• Experience working with Kubernetes and Helm, particularly for GitLab self-hosting on Azure.
• Experience with GitLab version upgrades, schema migrations, and maintenance in highly available environments.
• Prior deployments of self-hosted GitLab for highly regulated, enterprise organisations (e.g., banking, finance).
• GitLab certifications or experience contributing to GitLab Community/Enterprise projects.

Working at Ascent 

At Ascent we promote a healthy work-life balance by offering flexibility in where you work.  We also promote well-being and provide access to Well Being Coaches.  

Your development and learning will be taken seriously, and we’ll support your professional development with training and certification, with regular feedback and review. It is a fun, supportive and modern workplace where we really live by our company values of Empathy, Energy and Audacity! Ascent also offers a variety of benefits in each of our countries. 

Ascent is an equal opportunities employer. We take intentional steps to ensure inclusion and belonging are something real here, not just something we talk about. No person will be treated less favourably because of their gender, pregnancy, and maternity status, marital or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ethnic origin, age, religion or belief, or disability status. If you require any reasonable accommodation, please let us know when you apply.