DevOps Engineer

Salary: £140,338 - 140,338 per year

Requirements:

• Applicants must have the right to work in the UK and be eligible for SC clearance.
• Ideally, at least 5 years of experience designing, building, and maintaining on-premises Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience developing and deploying applications hosted on Kubernetes.
• Experience with Ansible and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with DevSecOps tooling that provides CI/CD capability.
• Experience with IP-based network design and the Linux operating system.
• Ability to operate at engineering leadership and architecture level.
• Strong experience designing Kubernetes platforms, not just operating them.
• Proven experience integrating Kubernetes with CI/CD systems.
• Experience with multi-team platform design and governance.
• Desirable: experience with GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or Flux; cloud-native build tools such as BuildKit or Kaniko; and enterprise-scale engineering environments.

Responsibilities:

• Define the architectural approach, design decisions, and engineering standards for our future CI capabilities.
• Work with engineering leadership to introduce containerisation in a way that supports immediate delivery and longer-term goals, including multi-team adoption, cost efficiency, and developer experience.
• Support the AUKUS USTI project by integrating US Common Infrastructure Services into CI and assessing the impact of receiving a US system on CI design across programmes.
• Maintain a rig in NH to support ongoing installation of CIS software drops, and conduct analysis and testing to identify and deliver critical change specifications over the following three years.
• After USTI is completed, lead the technical delivery of changes across programmes within the CIIS team.
• Define end-to-end architecture for CI workloads running on Kubernetes, including workload isolation, networking, artifact flows, autoscaling, and resource management.
• Design a secure container supply chain, covering image build, scanning and promotion, registry and environment separation, policy enforcement, and secrets management integration.
• Define observability and operational approaches, including logging, metrics, monitoring, platform visibility, and alerting for CI workloads.
• Identify candidate workloads for migration and develop phased adoption plans, risk controls, and rollback strategies.
• Deploy and maintain an on-premises Kubernetes environment, lead experimentation and analysis, and report on system design and its impact on CI capabilities.
• Provide technical guidance and mentor less experienced team members to support their technical development.

Technologies:

• Ansible
• ArgoCD
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevSecOps
• GitOps
• Support
• Kubernetes
• LESS
• Linux
• Network
• Security
• DevOps
• Flow

More:

We are seeking an experienced Kubernetes contractor to help shape our future CI capabilities and support meaningful work in technology, innovation, and national security. Our work brings together talented people and digital capabilities to help protect what matters in an increasingly connected world. The role initially supports the AUKUS USTI project, with the expectation of contributing to CIIS delivery afterward. It is based in Frimley (GU16), requires 2–3 days per week, pays £67.47 per hour inside IR35, and is offered on a 12-month contract. We offer the opportunity to work on complex customer challenges, develop your skills, and make a real impact.

last updated 39 week of 2026