Lead DevOps Engineer - Department Science, Innovation & Technology - G7

Location

Darlington, London, Salford

At DSIT we’re all about improving people’s lives by maximising the potential of science & technology. We accelerate innovation, investment and productivity through world‑class science, research and development. We use technology for good by ensuring new and existing technologies are safely developed and deployed across the UK, with the benefits more widely shared. We are driving forward a modern digital government which gives citizens a more satisfying experience and their time back.

We do all this to enable the Government’s five national missions: kickstarting economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower, taking back our streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity and building an NHS fit for the future. Above all, we focus on improving people’s lives. Outcomes for citizens are at the heart of what we do.

The Dev Ops Lead plays a central role in enabling secure, scalable, and high‑quality digital services within BDUK. The role provides both hands‑on engineering expertise and technical leadership, ensuring that modern Dev Ops practices, automation, cloud infrastructure and operational reliability are consistently applied across teams to provide quality digital services within BDUK.

• Lead BDUK’s Dev Ops community, writing and defining its broader strategy and folding into other key BDUK strategies.
• Lead the long‑term Dev Ops and cloud engineering strategy for BDUK, ensuring alignment with organisational digital data and technology goals.
• Define and own the Dev Ops maturity roadmap for the organisation, supporting strategic planning and transformation initiatives.
• Lead the design, optimisation and governance of CI/CD pipelines using Git Hub Actions, enabling secure and automated software delivery.
• Define, implement and mature Dev Ops practices across engineering teams to drive automation, observability, continuous improvement and operational reliability.
• Ensure cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines meet DSIT security, compliance, performance and resilience standards.
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership across cloud engineering, including IaC, deployment automation, monitoring and service reliability.
• Support capability uplift by mentoring engineers, producing reusable patterns and contributing to Dev Ops communities of practice.
• Drive the adoption of modern tooling, particularly Terraform, Git Hub Actions, containerisation, observability tooling and Dev Sec Ops  approaches.
• Line manage junior Dev Ops roles, working with staff to define objectives, manage development and performance.

• Strong programming experience in at least one of the following:
  Python, Linux, Terraform.
• Strong experience in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience in addressing cloud and security vulnerabilities.
• Experience in cloud cost optimisation (Fin Ops).
• Demonstrative experience in improving engineering standards and maturing Dev Ops ways of working.

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent discipline, or substantial professional experience in Dev Ops, cloud engineering, or platform engineering.
• Experience in Sec Ops.
• Experience managing data or platform engineers.

We offer flexible working benefits, employee well‑being support and a great pension. We are a Disability Confident Leader employer and support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process.