DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes Specialist

Devops Engineer - Kubernetes Specialist £67.47 per hour (Inside IR35) 12 month contract 2-3 days a week Frimley (GU16) Applicants must have the right to work in the UK Successful applicants must be eligible for SC clearance Our client is at the forefront of technology, innovation and national security. Bringing together talented people, cutting-edge digital capabilities and a shared purpose: to protect what matters most in an increasingly connected world. Looking for passionate, curious and forward-thinking individuals to join our team and help solve some of the most complex challenges facing our customers. Whether you’re an experienced professional or looking to take the next step in your career, you’ll have the opportunity to work on meaningful projects, develop your skills and make a real impact. Seeking an experienced Kubernetes contractor to help define this direction. The emphasis of this role is not on simply deploying or administering Kubernetes clusters, but on shaping the architectural approach, design decisions, and engineering standards that will underpin our future CI capabilities. This individual will work closely with engineering leadership to ensure that containerisation is introduced in a way that supports both immediate delivery needs and longer-term strategic goals, including multi-team adoption, cost efficiency, and developer experience. An experienced Kubernetes engineer is required to support the immediate AUKUS USTI project with the integration of US Common Infrastructure Services (CIS) into CI (next ~3years) following which the role would be required within CIIS for delivery of CI capability. The aims of the USTI work are to assess the impact of receiving a US system to provide CI capabilities on CI design for al programmes. The work requires maintaining a rig in NH to support continued installation of CIS software drops upon which analysis and testing is required to identify and deliver critical changes specifications over the following 3 years. Following completion of USTI, the experience/role would be required within the CIIS team to lead the technical delivery of these changes across all programmes. Target Architecture Definition End to end architecture for CI workloads running on KubernetesWorkload isolation, networking, and artifact flow designAutoscaling strategyResource management approachSecure Container Supply Chain Image build, scanning, and promotion architectureRegistry design and environment separation modelPolicy enforcement approachSecrets management integrationObservability & Operational Model Logging, metrics and monitoring for CI workloadsPlatform level visibility and alertingMigration Strategy Identification of candidate workloadsPhased adoption planRisk and rollback strategiesThe role requires an in-depth and hands on experience with an on-premises k8s environment to deploy, and maintain a cluster and lead experimentation and analysis of the implementation to report on the system design and its impact on CI capabilities. The role also requires providing technical guidance and experience to mentor less experience team members and aid in their technical development. The ideal candidate would have the following experience: Design, building and maintaining on premise Kubernetes clusters (Ideally 5+ years experience)Developing and deploying applications hosted on K8sAnsible and Infrastructure as CodeDevSecOps tooling providing CICD capabilityIP based network designLinux operating system Knowledge: Knowledge of container supply chain security Skills: Ability to operate at engineering leadership / architecture levelStrong experience designing Kubernetes platforms, not just operating themProven experience integrating Kubernetes with CI/CD systemsExperience with multi-team platform design and governance Desirable: Experience with GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux)Experience with cloud-native build tooling (e.g., BuildKit, Kaniko)Familiarity with enterprise-scale engineering environments