Principal Applications Engineer

Location:

Crawley, United Kingdom

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.

This role is a Principal Applications Engineer position within Thales UK’s engineering tooling team, focused on modernising and migrating the company’s engineering environments to a cloud-based Azure platform while maintaining existing toolsets and supporting engineering users throughout the transition.

Crawley or Reading or Cheadle or Bristol or Glasgow or any other Thales site in the UK

Thales is transforming how it delivers tools to its engineers by building the next generation of Engineering Environments on a cloud-based platform. In this role, you will:

• Build and support a modern, cloud-native tooling environment that provides an outstanding experience for engineering teams across the UK.
• Lead migration from legacy on-prem or older tooling to new Azure-based solutions, ensuring continuity of service during the transition.
• Work in an agile development team, collaborating closely with a Technical Product Owner and other stakeholders to plan, prioritise, and deliver improvements.
• Provide coaching and guidance to more junior team members and champion best practices in deployment, automation, and operations.

Your core accountabilities include:

• Deploy and support industry-leading tools on Thales’ cloud-based Azure infrastructure (e.g., CI/CD, artifact management, code quality, licensing).
• Build or modify deployment solutions where off‑the‑shelf reuse isn’t possible, often using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation.
• Improve current processes through automation, reducing manual effort and increasing consistency and reliability.
• Maintain existing environments through the transition phase, ensuring stability for engineering users while new platforms are rolled out.
• Support delivery teams with automated tools and scripts to provision infrastructure resources (compute, network, storage) in a simple and efficient manner.
• Implement operational best practices, including supervision/monitoring, backups, archives, and log management, to ensure robust, secure, and auditable environments.

We are looking for strong hands‑on experience in modern Dev Ops and platform engineering technologies. Highly desirable skills include:

• Linux administration and scripting
• CI/CD methodologies and pipeline design
• Kubernetes and Docker for containerisation and orchestration
• JFrog Platform (Artifactory/XRay) for artifact and dependency management
• Git Lab for source control and CI
• Ansible for configuration management and automation
• Python for scripting and tooling
• Virtual Machines and cloud infrastructure concepts

Plus experience in any of the following is a strong advantage:

• Atlassian Suite (Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence)
• Siemens Polarion (requirements/ALM)
• FlexLM License Server
• Black Duck SCA, Coverity, Sonar Qube (security and code quality)
• Jenkins (CI/CD)

• Performance-related bonus
• Half day every Friday, usually finishing around 13:00
• 28 days annual leave (plus bank holidays) with opportunity to buy up to 40 hours/year (pro rata)
• 24 hours volunteering paid for
• Private healthcare
• Pension scheme
• Life cover
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program and access to mental wellbeing app
• Employee discount shopping schemes on major brands and retailers
• Gym membership discounts

Due to the nature of the…