Lead DevOps Engineer - Department for Science, Innovation & Technology - G7

Location

Darlington, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary

At DSIT we’re all about improving people’s lives by maximising the potential of science & technology. 

We accelerate innovation, investment and productivity through world-class science, research and development.  

We use technology for good by ensuring new and existing technologies are safely developed and deployed across the UK, with the benefits more widely shared. 

We are driving forward a modern digital government which gives citizens a more satisfying experience and their time back. 

We do all this to enable the Government’s 5 national missions: kickstarting economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower, taking back our streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity and building an NHS fit for the future. 

Above all, we focus on improving people’s lives. Whether it’s researching new treatments for disease, developing better batteries, reducing burdens through better public services, keeping children safe online, and much more, outcomes for citizens are at the heart of what we do. 

Our Inclusive Environment  

We offer flexible working benefits, employee well-being support and a great pension. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.  

Find Out More 

We regularly run events where you can find out more about the department and tips for the application and interview process. You can sign up for upcoming events here: https://forms.office.com/e/Jae3B4w7xm  

You can also follow our LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dsitcareers/

Job description

The DevOps Lead plays a central role in enabling secure, scalable, and high-quality digital services within BDUK. The role provides both hands-on engineering expertise and technical leadership, ensuring that modern DevOps practices, automation, cloud infrastructure, and operational reliability are consistently applied across teams to provide quality digital services within BDUK.  
You will lead the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines, cloud environments, observability tooling, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks, with a strong emphasis on GitHub Actions and Terraform. You will help shape engineering behaviours, contribute to capability uplift and influence
organisational DevOps strategy.

Person specification

Key Responsibilities: 

•  Lead BDUK's DevOps community, writing and defining its broader strategy and folding into other key BDUK strategies. 
• Lead the long‑term DevOps and cloud engineering strategy for BDUK, ensuring alignment with organisational digital data and technology goals. 
• Define and own the DevOps maturity roadmap for the organisation, supporting strategic planning and transformation initiatives. 
• Lead the design, optimisation and governance of CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, enabling secure and automated software delivery.  
• Define, implement and mature DevOps practices across engineering teams to drive automation, observability, continuous improvement and operational reliability.  
• Ensure cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines meet DSIT security, compliance, performance and resilience standards.  
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership across cloud engineering, including IaC, deployment automation, monitoring and service reliability. 
• Support capability uplift by mentoring engineers, producing reusable patterns and contributing to DevOps communities of practice.  
• Drive the adoption of modern tooling, particularly Terraform, GitHub Actions, containerisation, observability tooling and DevSecOps approaches.
• Line manages junior DevOps roles. As a line manager, you will be responsible for working with your
  members of staff to define their objectives, as well as managing their development and performance.
• As a line manager, you will be responsible for working with your members of staff to define their objectives, as well as managing their development and performance. 

Essential Criteria:

• Strong programming experience in at least one of the following: Python, Linux, Terraform.
• Strong experience in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience in addressing cloud and security vulnerabilities .
• Experience in cloud cost optimisation (FinOps).
• Demonstrative experience in improving engineering standards and maturing DevOps ways of working.

Desirable Criteria:

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent discipline, or substantial professional experience in DevOps, cloud engineering, or platform engineering.
• Experience in SecOps.
• Experience managing data or platform engineers.