DevOps Engineer

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced DevOps Engineer to join our Engineering & Data team in Portugal. If you are in Lisbon area, you are weclome to join our office, on a hybrid basis. You’ll design, automate and run the cloud infrastructure behind a varied mix of client platforms, from new platforms built from scratch to established production systems. You’ll report to our Technical Manager and will work closely with our full stack software engineers, data and AI engineers, amongst other roles.

What you’ll actually be doing

• Designing, building and evolving cloud infrastructure for our clients’ platforms across AWS and Azure, mostly as code with Terraform.

• Keeping our CI/CD pipelines and containerised workloads running smoothly, so our teams can ship safely and often.

• Building infrastructure properly from the start: secure by design, consistently tagged, with production and non-production kept separate, and with the monitoring and alerting we need to stay audit-ready.

• Looking after reliability: backups, disaster recovery, scaling, and learning from incidents so they don’t happen twice.

• Keeping an eye on cloud costs and suggesting practical ways to cut them.

• Automating the repetitive stuff, and writing clear documentation and runbooks.

• Working closely with your engineering team colleagues, explaining options and trade-offs in plain language.

What we are looking for

The must-haves

• Typically 5+ years of hands-on experience in a DevOps, Cloud, SRE or Platform Engineering role.

• Production experience with either AWS or Azure and their core equivalents (e.g. EC2/Virtual Machines, VPC/Networking, IAM/Entra ID, RDS/Azure SQL, ElastiCache, S3/Storage, CloudFront/Front Door, CloudWatch/Azure Monitor).

• Strong, real-world Terraform skills: you’ll be writing production infrastructure from day one.

• Comfortable using AI coding assistants, such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot, in your day-to-day work.

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or similar), and working with Git.

• Good knowledge of Docker and container orchestration (ECS or Kubernetes).

• Comfort with Linux administration and scripting (Bash or Python).

• Strong cloud security skills: IAM and least privilege, network security, encryption and secrets management, backed by a security-first mindset.

• Solid networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, load balancing, routing).

• A pragmatic, delivery-focused approach: you look for the right solution at the right cost, and give reliable estimates you deliver against.

• Good written and spoken English: you’ll work every day with international clients and colleagues.

• The ability to manage your own time, juggle a few priorities and know when to ask for help.

Nice to have

• Database administration skills: SQL, performance tuning and partitioning strategies.

• Deeper Kubernetes experience (EKS or AKS, Helm, ArgoCD/Flux).

• AWS or Azure certifications, such as AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional, Azure Administrator Associate or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert.

• Experience working in organisations certified to ISO 27001, TISAX or Cyber Essentials, and knowing what compliant infrastructure looks like without being told: tagging, environment separation, alerting and logging.

A bit about us

We are The Virtual Forge: a data-driven software development, AI and cloud company with teams in the UK, Portugal and the US. We design and build data-rich, intelligent platforms for organisations around the world, from fast-growing scale-ups to household names with a global footprint.

Our approach is simple: our technical experts work side by side with our clients’ subject-matter experts, and together we build solutions that actually get used.

Life at The Virtual Forge

We call ourselves Team Purple, and we mean it. Wherever you sit — the US, the UK or Portugal — you’re part of one team, and you won’t be left to figure things out alone.

We’re pragmatic and we take ownership. We solve our clients’ problems with the right solution at the right cost, give reliable estimates and deliver against them. We value open, constructive communication: ideas and concerns are discussed with your line manager first, and we work through them together.

We invest in people who want to keep learning, with time, training budget and paid AWS certifications. And we protect work-life balance, because good work over years beats a burnt-out sprint every time.

What do you need to do

• Send your CV in English

• Gross Salary expectation and availability

Do you have concerns about facing discrimination based on factors such as age, gender, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity? Rest assured, at The Virtual Forge, we are committed to being an inclusive employer that values diversity in our workforce!

At The Virtual Forge, we have a dedicated recruitment team that works globally to fill all our recruitment needs. Therefore we don't need a response from recruitment companies. Thanks for understanding.