DevOps Engineer

• Location: Hybrid (Predominantly remote, with approx. 1 day per week in London and/or Bristol/Bath)
• Clearance Required: Active SC Clearance
• Engagement via: Consultancy

Job Description

Lead DevOps Engineer (Contract)

• Position Type: 6 months contract
• Rate: £650 Inside IR35
• Location: Hybrid (Predominantly remote, with approx. 1 day per week in London and/or Bristol/Bath)
• Clearance Required: Active SC Clearance
• Engagement via: Consultancy

A technology consultancy is seeking an experienced, client-facing Lead DevSecOps Engineer for an immediate contract engagement. You will drive, coordinate, and scale DevSecOps practices across a high-profile digital transformation programme within the UK Defence sector.

This role requires an immediate-impact engineer who can operate as a technical anchor, embedding modern GitOps workflows and stringent security compliance across a multi-cloud estate spanning AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This is a "hands-on and leading others" contract role.

Key Deliverables

• Deploy and Govern Pipelines: Rapidly evaluate, design, and improve secure, automated CI/CD and GitOps pipelines across multiple integrated product teams.
• Vulnerability Management: Seamlessly integrate automated security scanning into build/deployment workflows and manage the vulnerability lifecycle (including allowlist processes and pragmatical risk acceptance).
• Multi-Cloud Policy Enforcement: Standardize secrets management, identity/access management (IAM), and policy enforcement across AWS, Azure, and OCI workloads.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with developers, infrastructure engineers, and testers to embed secure-by-design principles from day one.
• Observability and Resilience: Ensure robust logging, monitoring, and audit controls are functioning across all environments using cloud-native tools.
• Runbook Documentation: Author and maintain clear security processes, controls, and operational runbooks in Confluence to unify distributed engineering teams.

Essential Skills And Experience

• Proven Technical Leadership: Experience establishing DevSecOps ways of working for distributed/hybrid teams while remaining deeply hands-on.
• Modern CI/CD and GitOps: Deep production experience with GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and Argo Rollouts for progressive delivery.
• Cloud Native Architecture: Strong hands‑on engineering with containers and orchestration (Docker, AWS EKS) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Security and Observability Tooling: Hands‑on experience with Trivy scanning, HashiCorp Vault, cert‑manager, Grafana, and Loki.
• Automation: Expert scripting skills (Python, Bash) paired with robust cloud networking fundamentals (IAM, S3, network policies).
• Public System Delivery: Proven experience delivering within the Government Digital Service (GDS) lifecycle on a UK public sector engagement.

Clearance and Logistics

• Security Clearance: Due to the nature of the end-client estate, candidates holding an active MOD SC Clearance will be heavily prioritized to ensure immediate billing. Minimum BPSS is required to start, with the mandate to undergo SC processing.
• Travel Requirements: This is a hybrid contract. While predominantly remote, you must be able to travel to client and consultancy sites in London and/or the Bristol/Bath area an average of 1 day per week (potentially more during critical delivery phases).

£600.00 - £650.00 / day