Lead AWS DevOps Engineer (SC CLEARED)

Job Title: DevOps Lead / Platform Engineering Lead

Location: Remote (w/ monthly office days - expenses paid if coming from outside M25 corridor)

Start Date: ASAP – 31/12/26 (Extensions likely)

IR35 Status: Inside IR35

Industry: Government

Interview Process: MS Teams, 1 Stage

We are seeking an experienced DevOps Lead to support the development and scaling of a cloud-native platform within a large, complex engineering environment. This role requires a hands-on technical leader who can define best practices, influence architecture, and drive a platform-first approach across multiple teams.

The successful candidate will operate at both a strategic and hands-on level, contributing directly to platform design while enabling engineering teams through scalable, well-defined tooling and processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve a scalable platform on AWS
• Lead the adoption of platform engineering principles and best practices
• Manage and optimise Kubernetes-based infrastructure
• Define and implement observability frameworks, including logging, monitoring, and alerting
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automation frameworks
• Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve developer experience and delivery efficiency
• Provide technical leadership and guidance across DevOps and platform initiatives
• Support incident management, root cause analysis, and system reliability improvements

Required Skills and Experience

• Extensive experience in DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering roles
• Comfortable with an ‘opinionated’ approach to leading DevOps work
• Strong hands-on expertise with AWS cloud services
• Proven experience building or scaling platform engineering solutions
• Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes in production environments
• Experience with observability tooling (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog)
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent)
• Experience working in large-scale or enterprise environments
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Ability to influence technical direction and challenge existing approaches