Principal DevOps Engineer (SC Cleared)

Job Title: Principal DevOps Engineer (SC Cleared)

Location: Remote (with ad-hoc travel to client's office in London - likely once a month)

Contract Length: 12 Months (with scope to extend)

Start Date: ASAP

IR35: Inside

Interview Process: 1 Stage, MS Teams

Clearance Required: SC (needs to have been used within the past 10 months)

We are supporting a government client in hiring a Principal DevOps Engineer to join their engineering leadership team, providing strategic technical leadership across the platform, applications, ingest pipelines and live services estate.

This is a hands-on senior technical leadership role, combining recent, personal engineering credibility with accountability for engineering governance, technical assurance, platform reliability and operational resilience across multiple teams and suppliers. The successful candidate will act as senior technical authority for engineering decisions and risk management, providing technical leadership during major incidents and critical service events.

This role suits an experienced Principal DevOps or Platform Engineer comfortable leading and mentoring multiple engineering teams, engaging confidently with senior stakeholders, and developing capable, autonomous teams rather than acting as a sole technical hero. Many of the supported systems operate 24/7, and engineers will be expected to be part of an on-call roster as required.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and direction across the platform, application, infrastructure and operational support teams
• Define and maintain engineering standards, best practices and technical governance processes
• Lead technical assurance activities across engineering workstreams, ensuring solutions meet security, operational and architectural requirements
• Support engineering delivery planning, prioritisation and technical decision-making across multiple teams and suppliers
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents, service disruptions and critical operational events
• Identify, manage and mitigate technical risks, dependencies and delivery constraints
• Review and approve solution designs, implementation approaches and significant technical changes
• Mentor, coach and develop engineers across all grades, promoting engineering capability and professional development
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, architects, suppliers and senior stakeholders to support successful delivery outcomes
• Maintain oversight of platform reliability, operational resilience, security posture and service performance
• Support the development and implementation of engineering roadmaps, technical strategy and service modernisation initiatives
• Be willing to be part of a 24/7 L3 support team (on call) as required

Essential Skills

• Strong, recent hands-on AWS cloud platform experience, including Terraform, Docker and Infrastructure as Code
• Experience providing engineering governance, technical assurance and leadership across multiple teams and suppliers
• Experience providing technical leadership during major incidents and live service operations within 24x7 environments
• Experience with NGINX and PostgreSQL (EC2 and RDS hosted environments)
• Experience with Transit Gateway, API Gateway and AWS Virtual Desktop
• Strong Linux and Windows administration experience
• Experience with VPN and OpenVPN technologies
• Experience with Elastic and Kibana for platform observability and monitoring
• Experience with GitLab source control, Jenkins and Groovy, including CI/CD pipeline design and implementation
• Experience with live service management, including incident, change and problem management, and ServiceNow (SNOW)
• Experience leading engineering strategy and technical roadmaps, and managing up to 6-8 direct reports where required
• Experience operating within Agile and DevOps delivery models

Desirable Skills

• Experience with C#, .NET, Entity Framework, JavaScript, React, Vue.js, WPF, REST APIs and microservices architecture
• Experience with AWS SageMaker, Large Language Model (LLM) integrations, AI-assisted analytics solutions and Python-based data analysis tooling
• Experience with enterprise cloud architecture, security architecture and secure-by-design principles
• Experience with technical assurance and governance, and disaster recovery and business continuity planning
• Experience supporting Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products in secure environments
• Knowledge of intelligence or law-enforcement platforms
• Experience supporting or troubleshooting analytical platforms such as SOLAR, MAT or equivalent capabilities
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage effectively with senior business and technical stakeholders
• Experience working within government, policing, national security or highly regulated environments