DevOps Engineer at Home Office, London, 6 Months, £Contract Rate

SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be willing & eligible to undergo checks. Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position (short-term nature of this role and speed at which we require a postholder in situ) preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance

The first duty of Government is to protect the public. Since 1782, the Home Office has led work to keep the country safe from those who seek to do it harm; in doing so, we make a vital contribution to HM Government's plan for a stronger, fairer, outward-looking and united Britain.

The Law Enforcement Cloud Platform (LECP) is the Home Office 's strategic cloud hosting solution for national law enforcement applications and products (LECP 's 'tenants '). LECP provides a secure, police-assured environment based on a common infrastructure design. By enabling access to shared services and tooling, LECP offers a cost-effective cloud solution, particularly for those needing to build new services or migrate away from existing hosting arrangements which no longer fulfil their requirements or align with organisational strategy.

The Senior DevOps is responsible for the reliable use of our platforms. Your role is not only to maintain our platforms, but also to design and build elements of them, working with our architects and standards. You will also consider the security of platforms and monitoring as necessary.

You will support long or short-term discovery within teams and with developers, helping them understand design constraints, and workforce/cost implications. You will advise on the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) pipelines, ensuring those new users are able to deploy at the appropriate speed. As necessary you may be working with a team long term to ensure effective work and maintain overall workflows.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, your main responsibilities will be:

• Supporting teams in mapping their stories to the available platforms, helping effectively build and deploy secure services
• Undertaking skilled platform build/support activities, such as developing hardened base containers
• Spotting instances where teams are not using best practice, advising around delivery risk
• Supporting engineers in service topology discovery; helping to define QA and deployment pipelines
• Driving adoption of new tools so teams they can improve their integration approaches, developing new or improved support processes for users
• Senior DevOps will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers in technical tasks, as well as support recruitment and assessment activities.

Essential:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency in designing, implementing, and maintaining infrastructure using Terraform, demonstrating a deep understanding of IaC principles to ensure scalability, reliability, and security.
• AWS Expertise: Extensive hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including but not limited to EC2, S3, Lambda, IAM, Redshift, and VPC configurations, along with a thorough understanding of AWS best practices.
• Git/GitLab/ Pipelines: Strong command of Git/GitLab for version control, including implementing CI/CD workflows using GitLab CI.
• DevOps Methodologies: In-depth knowledge of DevOps principles and practices, with the ability to orchestrate and automate end-to-end CI/CD pipelines for software deployment, testing, and monitoring.
• Scripting and Programming: Proficient in multiple programming languages (e.g., Terraform, Python, Bash, Ansible). Able to design, code, test, correct, and document programs and scripts. Experience reviewing specifications and defining test conditions and procedures. Have directed code reviews and promote refactoring techniques to enhance an enterprise level application codebase.
• Containerisation and Orchestration: Working knowledge of containerisation technologies such as Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, enabling efficient deployment and scaling of containerised applications.
• Security and Compliance: Strong understanding of security best practices in cloud and infrastructure management, ensuring the implementation of robust security measures and compliance standards within the environment.

Desired:

• Management of AWS Control Tower, Landing Zone along with the use methodologies like Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) or AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA).
• Management of forward and reverse proxy solutions e.g. the open-source products like Suricate or Fortinet solutions, along with experience of using AWS Native gateway products like AWS Network Firewall and WAF.
• Experience with Ansible, Salt, Puppet.
• GitLab CI and Artifactory administration (self-hosted ideally).
• AWS Data services: Glue, Athena, Lake Formation, QuickSight.
• Exposure to Entra ID and Microsoft Active Directory.
• GitLab Runners
• AWS Grafana & Prometheus

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

Disability Confident 

As a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, the Home Office guarantees to interview all candidates who have a disability and who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of candidates who have a disability who meet all the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. This scheme encourages candidates with a disability and/or neurodivergence to apply. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

Armed Forces Covenant

The Home Office guarantees to interview veterans or spouses / partners of military personnel who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of ex-military candidates / military spouses or partners, who meet all of the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different.