Senior AWS DevOps Engineer at Department for Work & Pensions, UK Office/Remote, 12 Months, £Contract Rate

As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will be part of a multi-functional agile delivery team and be an integral part of shaping and delivering automated solutions that enable Working Age Service benefits (incorporating Universal Credit) to deliver quality services consistently that meet the needs of our agents and claimants. The successful candidate will be expected to lead engineers as well as collaborate with others, actively seek input from colleagues and value a multidisciplinary team over hierarchy.

Essential Technical Skills

• Significant demonstrable experience of working in a DevOps environment - favouring and implementing Continuous Integration & Deployment over manual processes
• Significant demonstrable experience of designing, implementing, securing and supporting Unix/Linux based platforms (ideally RHEL / CentOS) and developing solutions using scripting languages (Bash, Python, Go)
• Significant demonstrable experience of developing and supporting cloud-based application platforms in AWS
• Significant demonstrable knowledge of implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (ideally Gitlab CI & Jenkins).
• Significant demonstrable experience in designing and implementing best practices using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Packer, CloudFormation and Cloud-Init
• Experience of working and leading in a complex, multi-disciplinary environment, delivering products within specific time-scales and engaging with multiple stakeholders

This role will act as a technical lead for a platform shared-service capability team within Working Age Services appropriate to the individual 's skills & experience. Therefore, there is an expectation that in addition to the skills listed above, you will have deep technical knowledge of developing and running several of the following technologies at scale:

• Data persistence - MongoDB/Atlas
• Messaging / events platforms - Kafka
• Observability tooling - Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Zabbix, CloudWatch
• Container hosting platforms - ECS/Fargate, Kubernetes, Rancher, Nomad
• Secrets Management - Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager
• Public Key Infrastructure - Hashicorp Vault, AWS Certificate Manager
• Identity management - Entra ID, Keycloak
• Desktop infrastructure - Apple Mobile Device Management, JAMF, ESET, Okta/Entra
• Security - TLS& PKI, Cloud Security, CIS Benchmarks, NCSC Cloud Security Principals, DAST/SAST
• Cloud Networking - TCP/IP, Routing, DNS, VPC Peering, VPC Endpoints, Transit Gateway, HAProxy, Traefik, NGINX, Service Mesh (Linkerd, Istio, Consul Connect, Lattice)

The ideal candidate:

• Flexible/adaptable. Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes effectively with complexity and change
• Takes responsibility/ownership. Proactively removes blockers to ensure that work is delivered. Is able to produce significant output with minimal wasted effort
• High standards. Is committed to quality and is therefore willing to challenge colleagues and to constantly question their own approach
• Strategic thinking and visioning. Able to understand and communicate the big picture and use it to prioritise and judge impact of smaller tasks and objectives
• Creativity/innovation. Generates new and innovative approaches to problems. Isn't bound by the status quo

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, DWP 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

DWP 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.