Lead DevOps Engineer at Met Office, Remote/Exeter, to 31/03/2026, £Contract Rate

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

• Provide technical leadership across ML Operations products, platforms, and services.
• Lead the technical design of solutions, ensuring they are supportable, scalable, secure, and maintainable.
• Make and justify technical decisions, balancing delivery needs, operational requirements, technical risk, and long-term sustainability.
• Identify and manage technical debt, ensuring appropriate engineering trade-offs are understood and communicated.
• Contribute to technical strategy and architectural direction, ensuring local decisions align with wider organisational objectives and standards.
• Lead the development and continuous improvement of software, services, and platform capabilities supporting machine learning operations.

PLEASE NOTE: 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.

Essential:

• Active Security Clearance (SC) is requried for this position
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native platforms in Azure.
• Python
• Kubernetes
• Containerisation (Docker, Apptainer or equivalent)
• Experience of ML Ops tooling - MLFlow, AzureML or equivalent.
• CI/CD pipeline development and automation.
• Infrastructure as Code.

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

Disability Confident 

As a Disability Confident employer, The Met Office encourage applications from disabled and neurodivergent candidates. Applications from candidates who identify as having a disability and meet the essential criteria for the role will be prioritised for review. Where application volumes are high, additional role-specific and desirable criteria may be applied as part of the 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.