Principal DevOps Engineer

Job Title: Principal DevOps Engineer (SC Cleared) Location: Remote (with ad-hoc travel to client's office in London - likely once a month) Contract Length: 12 Months (with scope to extend) Start Date: ASAP IR35: Inside Interview Process: 1 Stage, MS Teams Clearance Required: SC (needs to have been used within the past 10 months) We are supporting a government client in hiring a Principal DevOps Engineer to join their engineering leadership team, providing strategic technical leadership across the platform, applications, ingest pipelines and live services estate. This is a hands-on senior technical leadership role, combining recent, personal engineering credibility with accountability for engineering governance, technical assurance, platform reliability and operational resilience across multiple teams and suppliers. The successful candidate will act as senior technical authority for engineering decisions and risk management, providing technical leadership during major incidents and critical service events. This role suits an experienced Principal DevOps or Platform Engineer comfortable leading and mentoring multiple engineering teams, engaging confidently with senior stakeholders, and developing capable, autonomous teams rather than acting as a sole technical hero. Many of the supported systems operate 24/7, and engineers will be expected to be part of an on-call roster as required. Key Responsibilities Provide technical leadership and direction across the platform, application, infrastructure and operational support teamsDefine and maintain engineering standards, best practices and technical governance processesLead technical assurance activities across engineering workstreams, ensuring solutions meet security, operational and architectural requirementsSupport engineering delivery planning, prioritisation and technical decision-making across multiple teams and suppliersProvide technical leadership during major incidents, service disruptions and critical operational eventsIdentify, manage and mitigate technical risks, dependencies and delivery constraintsReview and approve solution designs, implementation approaches and significant technical changesMentor, coach and develop engineers across all grades, promoting engineering capability and professional developmentCollaborate with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, architects, suppliers and senior stakeholders to support successful delivery outcomesMaintain oversight of platform reliability, operational resilience, security posture and service performanceSupport the development and implementation of engineering roadmaps, technical strategy and service modernisation initiativesBe willing to be part of a 24/7 L3 support team (on call) as required Essential Skills Strong, recent hands-on AWS cloud platform experience, including Terraform, Docker and Infrastructure as CodeExperience providing engineering governance, technical assurance and leadership across multiple teams and suppliersExperience providing technical leadership during major incidents and live service operations within 24x7 environmentsExperience with NGINX and PostgreSQL (EC2 and RDS hosted environments)Experience with Transit Gateway, API Gateway and AWS Virtual DesktopStrong Linux and Windows administration experienceExperience with VPN and OpenVPN technologiesExperience with Elastic and Kibana for platform observability and monitoringExperience with GitLab source control, Jenkins and Groovy, including CI/CD pipeline design and implementationExperience with live service management, including incident, change and problem management, and ServiceNow (SNOW)Experience leading engineering strategy and technical roadmaps, and managing up to 6-8 direct reports where requiredExperience operating within Agile and DevOps delivery models Desirable Skills Experience with C#, .NET, Entity Framework, JavaScript, React, Vue.js, WPF, REST APIs and microservices architectureExperience with AWS SageMaker, Large Language Model (LLM) integrations, AI-assisted analytics solutions and Python-based data analysis toolingExperience with enterprise cloud architecture, security architecture and secure-by-design principlesExperience with technical assurance and governance, and disaster recovery and business continuity planningExperience supporting Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products in secure environmentsKnowledge of intelligence or law-enforcement platformsExperience supporting or troubleshooting analytical platforms such as SOLAR, MAT or equivalent capabilitiesExcellent communication skills, with the ability to engage effectively with senior business and technical stakeholdersExperience working within government, policing, national security or highly regulated environments