Office for National Statistics
Lead DevSecOps Engineer
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Locations:
Newport, Titchfield (Fareham)
Hybrid Working:
This role is aligned to ONS hybrid working principles, which are based on attending the office with purpose. The postholder will be expected to contribute to the organisation’s overall 40% office attendance, in line with business and role requirements.
Induction:
The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.
Job Summary
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.
The Survey Data Collection (SDC) service is responsible for the development, maintenance and continuous enhancement of the products that underpin high‑quality questionnaire design, survey delivery and online data collection across the platform. The service provides end‑to‑end technical and operational support across its product portfolio, meeting the needs of both internal and external users.
Job Description
This Grade 7 Lead DevSecOps Engineer role will work closely with technical leads across SDC and will provide leadership and direction across the platform’s diverse and complex technical estate. The role will initially focus on a defined product area but may flex across the platform based on priorities. It requires strong knowledge and hands‑on experience of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments and services - including secure design, deployment and governance of workloads across GCP compute, networking, storage, IAM, and Cloud Security Command Center. The role also demands solid capability in Python for automation and tooling, alongside mastery of modern DevSecOps practices such as infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipeline design, security automation, policy enforcement, container orchestration, and continuous monitoring to ensure secure, scalable and resilient delivery across the platform.
Lead DevSecOps Engineers are responsible for shaping technical initiatives of high complexity or risk to ensure the successful, secure, and scalable design, build and run of cloud platforms using infrastructure as code.
Responsibilities
- Designing, configuring, and delivering applications and infrastructure as code to serve a variety of business process and user needs.
- Working in a DevSecOps environment to support and enhance existing applications and infrastructure including operational processes, including the implementation and use of monitoring, management information and reporting solutions.
- Ensuring best practice security principles such as ‘least privilege’ are continually adhered to and embedding ‘secure by design’ in all elements of your work; ensuring risks are identified and appropriate mitigation actions are implemented.
- Being a practitioner and advocate in the use of DevSecOps technologies, tools, and practices.
- Utilise knowledge of requirements including functional and others, such as performance, scalability, resilience, and security to support the robust implementation and optimisation of business applications, demonstrating system functionality and performance through testing.
- Using Agile ways of working to identify and manage development tools and test environments, centralise code / configuration, CI/CD pipelines, maintain development standards and enhance automation.
- Sharing knowledge of tools and techniques; identifying and sharing good practices and collaborating to improve the capability of the team and wider Organisation.
- Providing coaching and mentoring to colleagues, ensuring continual improvement for the team and the wider Organisation.
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Person Specification
Essential Criteria:
- Programming and Build (Practitioner): Collaborate with others when necessary to review specifications. Use the agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using the right standards and tools. You contribute to code reviews and give constructive feedback to others.
- Information Security (Expert): Design, review and quality assure solutions and services, ensuring that they are specifically engineered to mitigate security threats. Lead others in using appropriate information security practices.
- Service Support (Expert): Identify, locate and fix complex service faults. Advise others on different methodologies and types of service support.
- Availability and Capacity Management (Working): You can: Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Community collaboration (practitioner): Actively support and contribute to the community (for example, leading the development and implementation of community events, supporting cross-community work, community working group involvement). Advocate for and role model participation in the community, exemplifying the value of community collaboration. Advocate for and role model the sharing of knowledge and experience through mentoring, shadowing and coaching opportunities.
Behaviours
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Managing a Quality Service
- Changing and Improving
Technical Skills
- Programming and build (Practitioner)
- Information Security (Expert)
- Service Support (Expert)
- Availability and capacity management (Working)
Salary and Benefits
Alongside your salary of £60,007, Office for National Statistics contributes £17,384 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
Inclusion & Accessibility
At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.
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 for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection Process Details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles, and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.
Security Clearance
For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying and the department will consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide this will result in your application being rejected.
Visa Sponsorship
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ONS may be able to provide visa sponsorship where the role meets ONS sponsorship criteria and all relevant Home Office requirements. Applicants must hold, or be eligible to obtain, the right to work in the UK before employment commences.
Application Process
Number of Stages: 2 stage process
Stage 1: Application
Stage 2: Interview
Stage 1 – Application
The assessment process at the application stage will be based on your work history, CV, skills, experience, and personal statement. It is important that your application is tailored to highlight the skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to the role.
A personal statement is required at application stage, the maximum word count allowed is 1250 words, which should not be exceeded. You should provide evidence for each essential skill criterion listed in the person specification. As these criteria are scored, it is advisable to give clear examples for each one, including the impact of your actions, ideally utilising the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
In instances where a high number of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted, and candidates will be invited to interview based on merit order, i.e., those with the highest scores.
Stage 2 – Interview
If invited to interview, you will be assessed using techniques aligned with the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, covering all behaviours listed in the job advert and any required technical skills.
You will be required to provide a 7 minute presentation at interview. The presentation topic will be emailed to candidates who have passed the initial online application stage, 1 week prior to interview. This presentation will assess candidates against the Success Profiles Behaviour Changing and improving.
Interviews will be via Microsoft Teams.
Please note you will be asked to provide ID at the start of the interview.
A reserve list may be held for a period up to 12 months from which further appointments may be made.
Important Dates
- Eligibility Security Clearance checks from 16/09 - 23/09. We will be sending you an e-mail with a form to fill out. Please check your junk e-mails for any correspondence.
- Sift will be conducted from 24/09/2026
- Interviews will be conducted from 12/10/2026
Government Digital and Data (GDD) Capability and Pay Framework
If you are successful at interview, your salary will be directly linked to your capability outcome, as determined by your performance in the Technical section of the interview.
Capability Outcome: Assessed based on scores achieved during the technical interview. Salary Determination: Your starting salary will reflect the capability level assigned. Feedback: Full feedback on your capability outcome will be provided at the point of offer.
All Successful Candidates Are Required To Undertake An annual Capability Assessment as Part Of Their Ongoing Employment Terms. The Outcome Of This Assessment Directly Influences Individual Pay Levels:
- Higher Capability Outcome: Results in an increase in pay.
- Lower Capability Outcome: Results in a decrease in pay.
Completion of the assessment is mandatory. Failure to complete the annual capability assessment will result in the individual being transitioned to ONS pay terms and conditions, with a corresponding adjustment to their pay.
Starting salary for roles within the Government Digital and Data (GDD) Capability and Pay Framework is determined solely by the capability outcome achieved during the recruitment process.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a basic (or equivalent) criminal
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