Birketts LLP
Chelmsford, Essex
About us Birketts is a full service, UK Top 50 law firm. With a heritage spanning 160 years, we have more than 700 lawyers and legal professionals and over 600 staff based in Bristol, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Ipswich, London, Norwich and Sevenoaks. We advise businesses, government and public sector organisations and individuals in the UK and internationally across four principal practice groups: Real Estate, Corporate Services, Dispute Resolution and Private Client. The team you will join The Birketts Private Client Division is recognised as one of the leading teams for advising individuals, families, and trustees. We provide bespoke advice on protecting wealth, planning for the future, and managing complex personal and family matters, often in conjunction with corporate structures and business interests. Our expertise spans everything from succession and tax planning to trusts, family law, Court of Protection, agricultural estates, ecclesiastical issues, and dispute resolution. We pride ourselves on delivering technically excellent, practical solutions with a personal approach that clients can trust. Our award-winning team of agricultural specialists is one of the best qualified and largest agricultural teams in the UK market, providing a comprehensive range of legal services to farmers, landowners and agri-business specialists. The team advises both UK and international clients on all aspects of UK legislation affecting rural real estate investment - including farm acquisitions and disposals, renewable energy projects, planning issues, natural capital, investment in equestrian and rural estate, rights of way and environmental liabilities. The work you will be doing You will work as part of an administration team to provide professional, proactive, high level administrative support to an allocated group of fee earners and to the wider fee earning team. Produce and amend documents with speed and accuracy Assist in maintaining compliant and accurate file management and office systems Format, paginate, number and present documents in Birketts LLP 'house style' Process all forms including new client form, new matter form, money laundering form, training course booking forms etc Ensure that all electronic filing and paper-based filing is up to date and maintained at regular intervals Respond to internal and external telephone enquiries Manage diaries in Outlook and make all necessary travel arrangements Use the HMRC and HMLR portals for submitting Stamp Duty Land Tax returns and HM Land Registry applications Able to communicate with a wide variety of different people from first time buyers to multi-million pound investor clients, buying and selling agents and mortgage brokers Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested. What we are looking for We are seeking a highly organised and detail-oriented Legal Secretary to provide support to the team. Ideally you will have the following skills and experience: Strong administration experience Positive, enthusiastic and professional approach Strong attention to detail and high-level organisational skills Excellent spelling and punctuation Self-motivated, ability to use initiative and provide pro-active support to fee-earners Ability to work under pressure and meet strict deadline Prior experience working in a legal environment is preferred Ability to handle sensitive information with discretion and professionalism Hybrid Working Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. During your 6 month probation period, there will be a requirement to be in the office full time whilst you are developing in the role. Once you have successfully passed probation, this role attracts 1 day working from home. Benefits As a Birketts colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits: 25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed) Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee) Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share) Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance Paid CSR Day Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave Subsidised gym membership Electric car scheme Dress for your Day Policy Inclusivity and Culture At Birketts, our culture is driven by ambition and a commitment to positively impact all the communities we serve. We are dedicated to the success, development, and wellbeing of our colleagues, helping them achieve their goals and seize the opportunities that come with our growth. Birketts is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our policy is unequivocal: we do not tolerate discrimination based on age, disability, sex, race, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, or sexual orientation. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive organisation that actively promotes equality of opportunity for all, valuing the right mix of talent, skills, and potential. We welcome applications from a diverse range of candidates, and selection for roles is based solely on individual merit.
About us Birketts is a full service, UK Top 50 law firm. With a heritage spanning 160 years, we have more than 700 lawyers and legal professionals and over 600 staff based in Bristol, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Ipswich, London, Norwich and Sevenoaks. We advise businesses, government and public sector organisations and individuals in the UK and internationally across four principal practice groups: Real Estate, Corporate Services, Dispute Resolution and Private Client. The team you will join The Birketts Private Client Division is recognised as one of the leading teams for advising individuals, families, and trustees. We provide bespoke advice on protecting wealth, planning for the future, and managing complex personal and family matters, often in conjunction with corporate structures and business interests. Our expertise spans everything from succession and tax planning to trusts, family law, Court of Protection, agricultural estates, ecclesiastical issues, and dispute resolution. We pride ourselves on delivering technically excellent, practical solutions with a personal approach that clients can trust. Our award-winning team of agricultural specialists is one of the best qualified and largest agricultural teams in the UK market, providing a comprehensive range of legal services to farmers, landowners and agri-business specialists. The team advises both UK and international clients on all aspects of UK legislation affecting rural real estate investment - including farm acquisitions and disposals, renewable energy projects, planning issues, natural capital, investment in equestrian and rural estate, rights of way and environmental liabilities. The work you will be doing You will work as part of an administration team to provide professional, proactive, high level administrative support to an allocated group of fee earners and to the wider fee earning team. Produce and amend documents with speed and accuracy Assist in maintaining compliant and accurate file management and office systems Format, paginate, number and present documents in Birketts LLP 'house style' Process all forms including new client form, new matter form, money laundering form, training course booking forms etc Ensure that all electronic filing and paper-based filing is up to date and maintained at regular intervals Respond to internal and external telephone enquiries Manage diaries in Outlook and make all necessary travel arrangements Use the HMRC and HMLR portals for submitting Stamp Duty Land Tax returns and HM Land Registry applications Able to communicate with a wide variety of different people from first time buyers to multi-million pound investor clients, buying and selling agents and mortgage brokers Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested. What we are looking for We are seeking a highly organised and detail-oriented Legal Secretary to provide support to the team. Ideally you will have the following skills and experience: Strong administration experience Positive, enthusiastic and professional approach Strong attention to detail and high-level organisational skills Excellent spelling and punctuation Self-motivated, ability to use initiative and provide pro-active support to fee-earners Ability to work under pressure and meet strict deadline Prior experience working in a legal environment is preferred Ability to handle sensitive information with discretion and professionalism Hybrid Working Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. During your 6 month probation period, there will be a requirement to be in the office full time whilst you are developing in the role. Once you have successfully passed probation, this role attracts 1 day working from home. Benefits As a Birketts colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits: 25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed) Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee) Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share) Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance Paid CSR Day Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave Subsidised gym membership Electric car scheme Dress for your Day Policy Inclusivity and Culture At Birketts, our culture is driven by ambition and a commitment to positively impact all the communities we serve. We are dedicated to the success, development, and wellbeing of our colleagues, helping them achieve their goals and seize the opportunities that come with our growth. Birketts is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our policy is unequivocal: we do not tolerate discrimination based on age, disability, sex, race, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, or sexual orientation. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive organisation that actively promotes equality of opportunity for all, valuing the right mix of talent, skills, and potential. We welcome applications from a diverse range of candidates, and selection for roles is based solely on individual merit.
Birketts LLP
Ipswich, Suffolk
The work you will be doing The Lead Dev Ops Engineer is accountable for the Azure platform, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and the delivery system (CI/CD standards, templates and controls) that enables Birketts squads to deliver to Azure quickly, safely and consistently. You will establish and maintain the "one right way" of working for Azure environments: guardrails, governance, repeatability and operational readiness. You will work closely with Product development leadership, security and infrastructure stakeholders to ensure standards are adopted through tooling (Azure Policy and Azure DevOps), not documentation alone. Platform ownership, governance and control Own subscription and landing zone hygiene, including remediation of legacy resources outside the agreed model Define and enforce platform governance standards: naming conventions, tagging schema, Azure Policy baseline and controlled exception handling Define and maintain identity and access patterns (RBAC and, where applicable, PIM) and platform security guardrails in collaboration with security and relevant stakeholders Improve platform cost governance by ensuring ownership and tagging discipline supports accurate reporting and accountability Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and integrity Establish and maintain Terraform as the authoritative mechanism for platform and environment provisioning and change control Design and maintain reusable IaC modules/patterns; implement safe change practices (review, validation, controlled applies) Reduce drift and improve environment repeatability across dev/QA/prod Delivery system (CI/CD) ownership and standardisation Define and evolve delivery system standards in partnership with the Product Development Team Leader, and enforce them through Azure DevOps templates, policies and required checks Own and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD standards, pipeline templates, approvals/gates, and environment promotion model Provide "golden path" templates and patterns for application-level and data-level delivery (including Azure resources) so squads can deliver without bespoke pipeline design per product Embed automated quality controls and security scanning into pipelines (e.g., SAST/SCA) and define secure secret-handling patterns aligned to Birketts expectations Implement and enforce PR/branch policies and release controls to reduce variability and operational risk Platform observability and operational readiness Provide and evolve platform observability foundations: monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and alerting (using the agreed toolset) Define and improve incident response and operational readiness expectations (runbooks, escalation paths, recovery/rollback patterns, environment health checks) Establish and maintain DR and operational processes for the platform and environments, with clear escalation to development squads where required Ways of working, coaching and continuous improvement Maintain a visible platform backlog and roadmap (stabilisation, governance, standardisation, developer experience) Coach squads in using the delivery system effectively (templates, PR discipline, gated releases, environment promotion) Support capability building for internal engineers (including infrastructure engineers where willing) using pairing and staged responsibility ("gated autonomy") Create and maintain platform documentation: handbook, onboarding guides, decision records and runbooks to reduce key-person dependency Assess DevOps capacity and resilience needs over time and provide recommendations for scaling the function as workload/support requirements mature Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested. What we are looking for A candidate who has owned or led DevOps / platform engineering capability in Azure and can balance delivery speed with governance and risk control Enjoys creating standards and guardrails that enable teams rather than slow them down Can operate effectively in an environment with mixed maturity, coaching teams while maintaining safe operational practices Essential Knowledge & Experience Proven, hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating Azure infrastructure (subscriptions, governance, identity/access, and core platform services) Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience, ideally Terraform (module/pattern design, environment patterns, safe change practices) Strong CI/CD engineering experience, ideally Azure DevOps (templating, approvals/gates, environment promotion strategies, required checks) Working understanding of security practices in cloud delivery (least privilege/IAM, secrets handling, secure pipeline patterns) Practical understanding of observability and operational readiness (logs/metrics/tracing concepts; dashboards/alerts; runbooks) Strong communication skills and ability to explain standards/guardrails in business-impact terms Hybrid Working Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. This role attracts a split of 60% office days and 40% working from home days per week. Benefits As a Birkett colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits: 25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed) Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee) Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share) Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance Paid CSR Day Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave Subsidised gym membership Electric car scheme Dress for your Day Policy
The work you will be doing The Lead Dev Ops Engineer is accountable for the Azure platform, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and the delivery system (CI/CD standards, templates and controls) that enables Birketts squads to deliver to Azure quickly, safely and consistently. You will establish and maintain the "one right way" of working for Azure environments: guardrails, governance, repeatability and operational readiness. You will work closely with Product development leadership, security and infrastructure stakeholders to ensure standards are adopted through tooling (Azure Policy and Azure DevOps), not documentation alone. Platform ownership, governance and control Own subscription and landing zone hygiene, including remediation of legacy resources outside the agreed model Define and enforce platform governance standards: naming conventions, tagging schema, Azure Policy baseline and controlled exception handling Define and maintain identity and access patterns (RBAC and, where applicable, PIM) and platform security guardrails in collaboration with security and relevant stakeholders Improve platform cost governance by ensuring ownership and tagging discipline supports accurate reporting and accountability Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and integrity Establish and maintain Terraform as the authoritative mechanism for platform and environment provisioning and change control Design and maintain reusable IaC modules/patterns; implement safe change practices (review, validation, controlled applies) Reduce drift and improve environment repeatability across dev/QA/prod Delivery system (CI/CD) ownership and standardisation Define and evolve delivery system standards in partnership with the Product Development Team Leader, and enforce them through Azure DevOps templates, policies and required checks Own and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD standards, pipeline templates, approvals/gates, and environment promotion model Provide "golden path" templates and patterns for application-level and data-level delivery (including Azure resources) so squads can deliver without bespoke pipeline design per product Embed automated quality controls and security scanning into pipelines (e.g., SAST/SCA) and define secure secret-handling patterns aligned to Birketts expectations Implement and enforce PR/branch policies and release controls to reduce variability and operational risk Platform observability and operational readiness Provide and evolve platform observability foundations: monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and alerting (using the agreed toolset) Define and improve incident response and operational readiness expectations (runbooks, escalation paths, recovery/rollback patterns, environment health checks) Establish and maintain DR and operational processes for the platform and environments, with clear escalation to development squads where required Ways of working, coaching and continuous improvement Maintain a visible platform backlog and roadmap (stabilisation, governance, standardisation, developer experience) Coach squads in using the delivery system effectively (templates, PR discipline, gated releases, environment promotion) Support capability building for internal engineers (including infrastructure engineers where willing) using pairing and staged responsibility ("gated autonomy") Create and maintain platform documentation: handbook, onboarding guides, decision records and runbooks to reduce key-person dependency Assess DevOps capacity and resilience needs over time and provide recommendations for scaling the function as workload/support requirements mature Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested. What we are looking for A candidate who has owned or led DevOps / platform engineering capability in Azure and can balance delivery speed with governance and risk control Enjoys creating standards and guardrails that enable teams rather than slow them down Can operate effectively in an environment with mixed maturity, coaching teams while maintaining safe operational practices Essential Knowledge & Experience Proven, hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating Azure infrastructure (subscriptions, governance, identity/access, and core platform services) Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience, ideally Terraform (module/pattern design, environment patterns, safe change practices) Strong CI/CD engineering experience, ideally Azure DevOps (templating, approvals/gates, environment promotion strategies, required checks) Working understanding of security practices in cloud delivery (least privilege/IAM, secrets handling, secure pipeline patterns) Practical understanding of observability and operational readiness (logs/metrics/tracing concepts; dashboards/alerts; runbooks) Strong communication skills and ability to explain standards/guardrails in business-impact terms Hybrid Working Birketts is a flexible business which has embraced a hybrid working model where our colleagues enjoy a mix of home and office working. This role attracts a split of 60% office days and 40% working from home days per week. Benefits As a Birkett colleague, you will be eligible to receive a wide range of benefits: 25 days holiday (FTE) plus Bank Holidays Long Service holiday award - 1 extra week every 10 years continuous service Private Healthcare with BUPA (offered after probation is passed) Scottish Widows Pension Scheme (5% employer / 5% Employee) Staff Profit Share and Individual Performance Bonus Scheme Salary sacrifice (Pensions, Staff Profit Share) Life Assurance - 4 x salary / Permanent Health Insurance Paid CSR Day Enhanced Maternity/Paternity Leave Subsidised gym membership Electric car scheme Dress for your Day Policy
