Lead DevOps Engineer - DWP - G6
Government Digital & Data -
Location
These roles may be located in one of the following locations; Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.
About the job
Job summary
Are you an experienced DevOps Engineer with a passion for automation excellence?
Would you love the opportunity to promote technical evolution within the organisation across multiple teams?
If so, come join us as a Lead DevOps Engineer!
We want driven, passionate and enthusiastic Lead DevOps Engineers, who can contribute to our demanding and exciting digital services that help and support our UK citizens. A fantastic opportunity for someone who would like to be part of delivering real value to the people that need help during their lives.
We want enthusiastic Lead DevOps Engineers, who can contribute to our demanding and exciting digital services that help and support our UK citizens. A fantastic opportunity for someone who would like to be part of delivering real value to the people that need help during their lives.
As a Lead DevOps you will work across a number of multi-functional agile delivery teams, guiding and supporting DevOps Engineers to build in quality, using industry best practices, to the products that make up our citizen services.
You will also be responsible for leading and driving our Engineering community ensuring DWP and DevOps practices evolve in line with technology advances.
If you are an experienced DevOps Engineer with a passion for automation excellence this could be the role for you; we have vacancies in the following functional areas:
- The Child Maintenance team are looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to help ensure the integrity of their services.
- Data and Analytics are looking for 2 Lead DevOps Engineers to support the data platforms in support of smarter, faster data driven decisions.
- Citizen Information are looking for a Lead DevOps Engineers to support building shared capabilities and improving developer experience.
Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.
Job description
In the Citizen Information team, you will be leading our DevOps engineers to build shared tooling and capabilities to improve their developer platform to improve developer experience and software development life cycle to release value faster with improved quality. They work with Kubernetes and AWS cloud services to provide an environment where the teams can iterate and innovative in an Agile way to really deliver for our users and you will be part of the team providing strategy and direction to the engineers alongside you.
Working across the Children’s area you will be pushing a mindset change to foster engineering ownership, and the importance of the integrity and maintenance of the services we deliver. The team underpins all of Children Digitals ambitions via the creation and maintenance of a stable, well-defined framework for all teams across Children to utilise when developing and building services that support Child Maintenance, securing money for children. The team is responsible for building and developing shared components and functionalities that support teams across Children deliver their critical online services to clients ensuring they are efficient and maintained.
Data and Analytics are looking for 2 highly skilled and motivated Lead DevOps Engineers to join their Data & Analytics team, one in Data Platforms and one in Data Enablement. You will drive the design, automation and optimization of our cloud-based data platforms and products. In this pivotal role you will you will lead DevOps best practice across platform and data engineering, analytics and AI/ML pipelines, ensuring reliable, scalable, secure delivery of data products and services that are critical to delivering services to 22m citizens, and, in supporting smarter, faster, joined-up data-driven decision making using interoperable data from across DWP, other government departments and external partners.
As a Lead DevOps Engineer in any of these areas you will be required to use modern tooling to develop CI/CD pipelines and DevOps toolchains where you will strive to put automation at the heart of everything you do.
You will have a proven experience in the development, deployment and support of software applications and services that are focused on stability, availability and quality.
You will promote the latest Engineering and DevOps practices, standards and processes then lead the Engineering community to deliver the strategic DevOps vision.
You will be required to build and maintain relationships, reconciling priorities and agreeing common action, working with the Lead DevOps Engineering community to ensure security, stability and capacity are embedded in the development and deployment of our citizen services.
You will be required to make complex decisions, involving a wide range of solutions, possibly affecting a number of work areas within the organisation.
You will work closely with senior leaders, sharing information, providing advice and support around technical choices, implementation approach, resourcing and identifying skills gaps and key dependencies within our technical teams.
Person specification
When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:
- Lead criterion: Experience leading and managing high-performing DevOps/platform engineering teams, including line management, career development, coaching, and driving delivery against strategic goals.
- Strong cross-functional leadership and stakeholder engagement skills, with experience coordinating across business areas, reporting to senior leadership, balancing competing priorities, and steering team efforts toward shared objectives.
- Demonstrated ability to own and maintain technical roadmaps, ensuring systems and products are aligned with business needs, remain compliant and secure, and have forward plans for scaling, lifecycle management, and tech debt reduction.
- Proven experience designing, delivering, and scaling complex cloud-based systems in AWS and/or Azure, with full ownership across the lifecycle—from architecture and deployment through optimisation, upgrades, and decommissioning.
- Significant proven experience in designing and implementing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and related as-code paradigms -including Configuration-as-Code, Policy-as-Code, and Pipeline-as-Code - with a focus on establishing enterprise-grade scaleable patterns, governance, and security. Demonstrated ability to define standards and reusable modules that promote consistency, compliance, and operational excellence across teams and environments.
- Track record of architecting, implementing, and evolving secure, resilient, and scalable CI/CD pipelines, aligned with DevOps best practices and integrated with quality, security, and observability tooling.
An initial sift may be conducted using the lead criteria stated above. Candidates who pass the initial sift will progress to a full sift.
If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact richard.hanley@dwp.gov.uk.
