Cloud Infrastructure Specialist

Ascent is proud to be trusted in setting up and scaling out a Centre of Excellence in Sofia that is fully integrated into BDO Global Office’s core operations. 


About BDO Global Office
BDO invests heavily in people, motivating and supporting talented teams across the globe. In 2015 they made the strategic decision to extend their core technical infrastructure team with a nearshore insourcing approach, bringing on high quality talent that could be fully integrated into the global world-class team of employees delivering outstanding service to their member companies. 
BDO’s focus was on quality and cultural fit, building out a team of great people committed to working for BDO for the long term, developing and acquiring new skills and responsibilities, and adding consistent value to the entire BDO Global Office team. 
Ascent helped to build out BDO Global Office’s core infra team and cloud support resources in Sofia, originally focused primarily on Microsoft cloud (Azure/ Office365) technology. The team expanded rapidly in both volume and discipline and today BDO’s team includes application support, business analysts, data analysts, project managers, solution architects and various business support roles, split across Bulgaria, Portugal, and the UK. 


About Ascent  
Ascent is a design-led software, data and cloud business that specializes in advanced analytics and AI.  We are an engineering business. We design, build and manage cloud-native products, solutions, platforms & experiences on Azure. 
Our pan-European community of engineers, architects, data scientists and digital consultants helps customers take on challenges and opportunities, so they can do something new, or do existing things better. 
From global insurance, consultancies, pharma, healthcare and retail to smart home devices, space exploration and cricket - we get to work with some of the sharpest minds in the brightest businesses. 


About the Role
This role will focus on design, deployment and automation of technical infrastructure services developed and hosted by BDO Global IT. The emphasis of the role will be on designing, deploying and automating infrastructure as code. The cloud engineer will also be active in administration and operations in the Global IT application landscape. Ensuring the integrity, availability, performance, recoverability, and security of the data services in accordance with established policies, procedures and to agreed service levels.

Key Accountabilities

• Administration of core cloud platform services across a variety of Microsoft cloud (Azure) technologies.
• Working with the architects to design the cloud infrastructure needed to run our services.
• Automation of re-occurring tasks and processes related to Infrastructure.
• Design of deployment pipelines and creating infrastructure as code templates to support these.
• Working to resolve tickets as they are escalated to our team. Communicating effectively with both internal and external resources via the helpdesk system, email, voice and Teams. Operating in accordance with ITSM standards.
• Ensure business continuity through effective and efficient replication, backup, and recovery methodologies of core IT data services
• Standardisation and documentation of common procedures that cannot be easily automated, for execution by other resources or teams
• Provide customer support in addition to general duties and contribution to team objectives
• Participate in the projects that change existing services, establish new services or retire services from an operational implementation and support perspective

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

• Five or more years of commercial IT experience in enterprise infrastructure implementation and administration.
• Demonstrate intermediate-to-advanced knowledge in the following technologies:
  • Azure PaaS infrastructure, like Azure apps, Azure storage, Key Vault, Azure SQL Failover groups, Azure Traffic Manager.
  • Tenant, subscription, and resource management in Azure.
  • Azure AD.
• Azure Resource Manager / BICEP / Terraform template creation
  • Designing, creating, and maintaining deployment pipelines in Octopus Deploy
• Designing, creating, and maintaining multistage deployment pipelines in Azure DevOps
• Intermediate-to-advanced PowerShell
• Demonstrate intermediate-to-advanced knowledge in the following technologies:
  • Azure SQL Vnets, Azure Virtual Machines
  • Azure SQL DB
  • Azure Monitor, Application Insights
  • Microsoft 365
• Experience working with custom internally-developed applications and interacting with development teams preferred.
• Fundamental knowledge of ITIL, or other IT Service Management methodology framework, and 3+ years experience working in an environment with:
  • Adherence to formal change management processes
  • Delivery of services and support to defined service levels
  • Experience using IT Service Management systems
• Effectively demonstrates leadership, teamwork, problem solving, initiative and integrity
• Excellent interpersonal and written communication skills; technical writing experience preferred
• Able to properly organize and structure workloads and tim

Working at Ascent  
At Ascent we promote a healthy work-life balance by offering flexibility in where you work whilst promoting mingling with colleagues. We also promote well-being and provide access to Well Being Coaches and a number of communities. 

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.