Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
Lead Azure DevOps Engineer
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This role may be located in one of the following locations; Blackpool or Manchester.
Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.
Job Summary
Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.
Are you excited about the opportunity to protect critical citizen facing services from cyber threats at scale?
Are you passionate about cloud technologies, automation, and building secure, resilient platforms?
Can you provide technical leadership while driving engineering excellence across DevOps and Azure services?
If so, we're looking for an experienced Lead Azure DevOps Engineer to help shape and deliver the future of cloud engineering.
In this role, you'll lead the design and evolution of enterprise DevOps capabilities across our Azure platform, driving automation, improving delivery speed, and embedding secure by design principles across critical services. You'll provide technical leadership, set engineering standards, and support teams in adopting best practices across CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud governance, and observability.
Working with modern Azure technologies, you'll architect secure, scalable, and highly available solutions, champion DevSecOps and Zero Trust principles, and help drive the adoption of cloud native approaches that improve reliability, resilience, and value for money.
This is a fantastic opportunity to influence strategy, mentor engineers, and lead the delivery of secure digital services that millions of people rely on every day.
Job Description
- Lead the strategy, architecture, and continuous evolution of enterprise Azure cloud and DevOps capabilities.
- Define and embed best practice across CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud governance, and engineering standards.
- Provide technical leadership and assurance, acting as a subject matter expert and influencing key architectural decisions.
- Architect, deploy, and support secure, scalable, and highly available Azure solutions using modern cloud native technologies.
- Drive automation and delivery excellence through Azure DevOps, Terraform, and Azure native tooling, enabling reliable and repeatable deployments.
- Champion DevSecOps, observability, resilience, and cost optimisation through proactive monitoring, security controls, and disaster recovery practices.
- Mentor engineers and collaborate across multidisciplinary teams to build capability, drive continuous improvement, and deliver secure, high quality services.
Person specification
See selection process for further details.
If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact Richard.hanley@dwp.gov.uk.
Qualifications
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert or similar.
Should you progress to interview, you will be asked to provide evidence of this.
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Technical Breadth
Alongside your salary of £75,026, Department for Work and Pensions contributes £21,735 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).
We also have a broad benefits package built around your work-life balance which includes:
- Working patterns to support work/life balance such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.
- Generous annual leave – at least 25 days on entry, increasing up to 30 days over time (pro–rata for part time employees), plus 9 days public and privilege leave.
- Support for financial wellbeing, including interest-free season ticket loans for travel, a cycle to work scheme and an employee discount scheme.
- Health and wellbeing support including our Employee Assistance Programme for specialist advice and counselling and the opportunity to join HASSRA a first-class programme of competitions, activities and benefits for its members (subscription payable monthly).
- Family friendly policies including enhanced maternity and shared parental leave pay after 1 year’s continuous service.
- Funded learning and development to support progress in your role and career. This includes industry recognised qualifications and accreditations, coaching, mentoring and talent development programmes.
- An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join professional and interpersonal networks including Women’s Network, National Race Network, National Disability Network (THRIVE) and many more.
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Hybrid Working
This role may be suitable for hybrid working, which is where an employee works part of the week in their DWP office and part of the week from home. This is a voluntary, non-contractual arrangement and your office will be your contractual place of work.
If a hybrid working arrangement is suitable for the role and for you, you will normally be required to spend a minimum of 60% of your contracted working hours from your DWP office.
If you have a disability, caring responsibilities, or other circumstances that may affect your ability to meet the minimum office attendance requirement, please discuss this with us using the contact details in this advert.
Salary Information
Pay for this role is from £75,026 to £92,522.
The maximum salary for the grade is £80,267, however a Digital Allowance of up to £12,255 per annum is available for exceptional candidates. Digital Allowance is non-salary, and non-pensionable, and is classed as a temporary allowance. It is reviewed annually where it could be retained, amended, or removed.
Our offer to successful candidates will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated at interview.
Existing Civil Servants who secure a new role on lateral transfer will maintain their current substantive salary.
Civil Servants who gain promotion will move to the bottom of the grade pay scale or receive a 10% increase applied to their current substantive salary, whichever is greater.
Any temporary allowances that you are currently in receipt of will not form part of the calculation to determine your pay. Any allowances that are in payment will cease when you move into your new role.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Experience and Technical skills.
Stage 1: Application
Your Application Will Consist Of Five Parts
- A Personal Details application form.
- Employment history - this should contain your work experience and any skills and accomplishments relevant to the jobs you have completed.
- Qualifications - please list any qualifications relevant to this role.
- Personal statement - up to 1250 words. This statement should be used to provide examples of how you meet the essential criteria below:
- CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code - Advanced, demonstrable capability in pipeline engineering and Infrastructure as Code, with hands-on experience designing, implementing and optimising CI/CD pipelines (for example Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI) and defining reusable, governed infrastructure using Terraform and Azure-native tooling (ARM or Bicep), setting the engineering standards that others follow.
- Containerisation and orchestration - Extensive experience building and operating scalable, resilient container platforms using Docker and Kubernetes, preferably Azure Kubernetes Service, from design through to production support.
- Security and DevSecOps - Strong, practical application of secure-by-design and Zero Trust principles, including managed identities, secrets management (for example Key Vault), RBAC and vulnerability management, embedding security throughout the delivery lifecycle.
- Automation and reliability engineering - Proficient in Python with solid scripting in PowerShell and Bash to drive automation and operational efficiency, combined with strong observability practice (for example Azure Monitor, Sentinel, Application Insights and Log Analytics) using SLIs, SLOs and distributed tracing to sustain and improve system reliability.
- Autonomy and technical leadership - Proven ability to work independently and self-manage priorities with minimal direction, taking end-to-end ownership of complex services. Sets technical direction and standards, drives the adoption of modern engineering practices, and influences and guides engineers and stakeholders to deliver measurable outcomes such as fewer incidents, faster and safer releases, and improved resilience.
- Technical statement (up to 250 words). The following statement is aligned to the required technical skill of Technical Breadth. This statement should be used to provide example(s) of how you meet the criterion below:
- Azure platform expertise and architecture - Deep hands-on expertise across the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, including core compute, networking, storage, identity and security services. Proven track record of independently designing, delivering and owning secure, scalable and highly available cloud environments at enterprise scale, with clear regard for availability, cost optimisation and compliance.
Get help with your application
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Ensure that all examples provided in your statements are taken directly from your own experience and that you describe the examples in your own words. If you choose to use gen-AI to support your statements, you must follow the guidelines outlined in the Artificial intelligence and recruitment guide.
The sift panel will use the information in your employment history, personal statement, and technical statement to assess your experience, skills and knowledge.
An initial sift will be conducted using the technical statement. Candidates who pass the initial sift will be progressed to a full sift.
If you do progress to a full sift, you will be provided with one combined overall assessment score for both your employment history and Personal Statement.
For Hints and Tips on completing your application visit Applying for jobs at DWP Digital.
Important Information
You will be asked to complete your employment history. Any information that you would customarily share on a CV should therefore be entered onto the application form. Personal details that could be used to identify you including your name, contact details and address must be removed for your application to be considered. If your employment history,
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