Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
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This role may be located in one of the following locations; Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle.
Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.
Please note that for candidates requesting to work in Newcastle, the role will initially be based at Benton Park View. It will then move to 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.
Job Summary
Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.
We’re looking for an outstanding Senior DevOps Engineer to help lead on the Internal Developer Portal which plays a pivotal role in accelerating delivery for over 2,000 engineers by turning complexity into clarity, and friction into flow. At the core of this role is the ability to design and champion a platform that enables teams to build, deploy, and operate services with confidence and speed - without re-inventing the wheel each time.
By providing a single pane of glass for service ownership, documentation, tooling, and operational insights, the portal empowers engineers to quickly understand the systems they depend on and contribute to. This visibility is not just about convenience - it drives better decisions, improves reliability, and reduces cognitive load across the organisation.
Beyond technical excellence, this role requires leadership. It requires setting standards, shaping best practices, and influencing teams toward a shared vision of modern, scalable engineering. Acting as both a strategic thinker and hands-on enabler, the Senior DevOps Engineer bridges the gap between platform capabilities and developer needs, ensuring the portal evolves alongside the organisation.
This role is ideal for someone passionate about platform engineering, internal developer platforms (IDPs), and modern DevOps practices, with hands-on experience designing and operating tools such as Backstage, Port, or similar.
Ultimately, success in this role is measured by how effectively teams can move - deploying faster, recovering quicker, and collaborating better. By fostering a culture of self-service, transparency, and continuous improvement, the Internal Developer Portal becomes more than a tool; it becomes a catalyst for engineering excellence at scale.
Job Description
As a Senior AWS DevOps Engineer, you will:
- Join the Developer Experience team as a Senior DevOps Engineer which acts as a key enabler for DWP’s engineering community. The team develop, maintain and support reusable CI/CD components, software templates, platform integrations, which are all surfaced through our internal developer portal that help delivery teams build and operate services consistently.
- Lead the design and evolution of our internal developer platform, enabling teams to build, deploy, and operate software efficiently through self-service capabilities, standardised workflows, and automation-first practices.
- Understand how service catalogues, ownership metadata, documentation, templates, scorecards and self-service workflows can be used to improve developer experience, reduce duplication and support engineering standards.
- Be using modern tooling to develop CI/CD pipelines and DevOps toolchains where you will strive to put automation at the heart of everything you do.
- Craft and implement solutions that are highly available, resilient, scalable, extensible, and maintainable within AWS cloud environments.
- Be working across the organisation you will be pushing a mindset change to foster engineering ownership, and the importance of the integrity and maintenance of the services we deliver.
- Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to engineers. You can lead knowledge-sharing, documentation and good practice across a wider engineering community, creating an inclusive environment where teams can contribute to shared tooling, standards and platform capabilities.
- Work across product-focused teams to gather requirements, evaluate tools, implementing/updating solutions, provision environments, and assisting with operational issues.
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As a Senior AWS DevOps Engineer, You Will
- Join the Developer Experience team as a Senior DevOps Engineer which acts as a key enabler for DWP’s engineering community. The team develop, maintain and support reusable CI/CD components, software templates, platform integrations, which are all surfaced through our internal developer portal that help delivery teams build and operate services consistently.
- Lead the design and evolution of our internal developer platform, enabling teams to build, deploy, and operate software efficiently through self-service capabilities, standardised workflows, and automation-first practices.
- Understand how service catalogues, ownership metadata, documentation, templates, scorecards and self-service workflows can be used to improve developer experience, reduce duplication and support engineering standards.
- Be using modern tooling to develop CI/CD pipelines and DevOps toolchains where you will strive to put automation at the heart of everything you do.
- Craft and implement solutions that are highly available, resilient, scalable, extensible, and maintainable within AWS cloud environments.
- Be working across the organisation you will be pushing a mindset change to foster engineering ownership, and the importance of the integrity and maintenance of the services we deliver.
- Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to engineers. You can lead knowledge-sharing, documentation and good practice across a wider engineering community, creating an inclusive environment where teams can contribute to shared tooling, standards and platform capabilities.
- Work across product-focused teams to gather requirements, evaluate tools, implementing/updating solutions, provision environments, and assisting with operational issues.
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.
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Technical Breadth
Alongside your salary of £57,946, Department for Work and Pensions contributes £16,786 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 £57,946 to £80,664.
The maximum salary for the grade is £68,205, however a Digital Allowance of up to £12,459 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.
See selection process for further details 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 Four Parts
- A Personal Details application form.
- Employment history - this should contain your work experience and any skills, qualifications and accomplishments relevant to the jobs you have completed.
- Personal statement - up to 1000 words. This statement should be used to provide examples of how you meet the essential criteria below:
- Proven experience of writing and maintaining Infrastructure, and Configuration as Code.
- Demonstrable experience of using Unix/Linux/Windows in a support and/or development environment including scripting languages.
- Demonstrable experience of
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