DevOps Engineer - HO - SEO

Location

Manchester, Sheffield

About the job

Job summary

Cyber Security at the Home Office is critical to protecting a large government department and safeguarding critical digital infrastructure. The Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) Threat Intelligence team is tasked with understanding and contextualising the Home Office’s cyber threat landscape. The team manages the department’s intelligence requirements, based on assessed threats to Home Office systems, then seeks to obtain and analyse data to identify threats and their potential impact. The specialised team of six works alongside other CSOC areas to provide awareness of threats, allowing for the deployment of targeted defences and the sharing of timely and actionable guidance. 

The DevOps Engineer ensures service reliability and performance by maintaining and supporting key components, proactively monitoring metrics, and performing updates to ensure accessibility, stability, and capacity for production and deployment. 

They provide guidance on CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) pipelines, advising developers on best practices to enable secure and efficient deployments. They help streamline automation and software delivery processes, ensuring the platform is effectively utilised. 

This role requires Security clearance and NVPP3. Typically you will need to have lived in the UK for the past 5 years to obtain these clearances. 

Job description

As a DevOps Engineer your main day to day responsibilities will be: 

• Providing hands-on technical support, troubleshooting platform use and configuration issues. 
• Support & mentorship of junior developers.  
• Development, Maintenance and continuous improvement of in-house automation platforms, scripts and services. 
• Contributing to routine monitoring activities, identifying performance improvements and security enhancements. 
• End-to-end technical onboarding of new systems into the Cyber Security environment. 
• Development, maintenance and continuous improvement of Cyber Security tooling and services.  
• Supporting Cyber Security functions with technical expertise & advice. 

Like many organisations we need to maintain our services 24/7, therefore, on occasions there may be a requirement to work out of hours, for which you will be paid an additional allowance.   

Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. Travel to the Manchester office will be required for the successful candidate.

Person specification

Essential Criteria 

You’ll have a strong foundation in DevOps culture, with the following skills or experience: 

• Designing and implementing cloud solutions using AWS or Azure, applying best practices for architecture, security, and scalability.
• Monitoring applications and responding to incidents using established procedures, ensuring system availability and performance.
• Developing and maintaining infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scripts to automate build, deployment, and provisioning activities.
• Working with and managing log data at scale.  
• Integration with third party suppliers & external departments. Working together to develop shared platforms.  
• Applying data management best practices for cloud resources, ensuring structured naming, tagging, metadata, backups, and documentation. 

Tools and Technologies we use: 

We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including: 

• Backend: Java, Node.js, C#, Python, PHP, Scala, Power Platform   
• Frontend: React, JavaScript, Typescript, Angular    
• Data: PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Neo4J, Amazon Athena  
• DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Terraform, Dynatrace 
• Security: Splunk, Defender, Suricata IDS, Zeek 

SFIA capability framework 

Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all engineering levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework:  All skills A–Z — English (sfia-online.org) 

We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process. 

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Delivering at Pace
• Working Together

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Software design (SWDN) - Level 3
• Programming/software development (PROG) - Level 3
• Testing (TEST) - Level 3
• Systems integration and build (SINT) - Level 3
• Data management (DATM) - Level 3
• Application support (ASUP) - Level 3