Lead DevOps Engineer

Pay: up to £92,522 plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and great work-life balance.

About the Role

This is a real and significant DevOps role in the UK's largest government department. Here you will have the freedom and autonomy to drive the development of our technical landscape and define what DevOps looks like in DWP.

DWP. Digital with Purpose.

You'll be a leading, expert voice in a DWP Digital community that is driving a once-in-a-generation transformation of public services. We have a unique purpose, putting better, more efficient services in the hands of DWP users. The scale of our engineering challenge is also huge:

• We have 1bn lines of code in over 12,000 code repos and 90+ programming languages.
• We run around 294 days' worth of testing every day through automation.
• Our APIs receive 173 million requests, and we spin up 280,000 AWS servers every month.
• Over 22 million people - 1/3 of the UK's adult population access our services daily.
• Over 100,000 colleagues and agents use the kit, tools and systems we roll out. We build and maintain systems behind payments worth over £195bn payments annually.

What Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Will You Need?

• 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.
• 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 optimization, and compliance.