Active SC - Azure DevOps Engineer - Remote - 12 Months

Job Title: Azure DevOps Engineer
Rate: £476 (Inside IR35)
Duration: 12 Months
Location: Remote - One day onsite in Manchester per week
Clearance: Active SC
Stages: 1 Stage

Key Responsibilities

CI/CD Strategy & Automation

• Define end-to-end CI/CD strategy, including branching models, environment promotion, and approval gates.
• Establish reusable pipeline templates for build, deploy, security scanning, policy compliance, SBOM generation, and model evaluation hooks.
• Implement automated environment promotion workflows with integrated gates for tests, security, cost, and compliance checks.

Infrastructure as Code & Security

• Design and implement Bicep module structure, adopting Azure Verified Modules and defining versioning strategy.
• Integrate secret management solutions (Managed Identity, Key Vault references) across pipelines.
• Enable automated policy compliance and drift detection reporting (eg, what-if analysis, policy evaluation on PR).

Observability & Operational Enablement

• Oversee platform observability bootstrap, including Log Analytics workspace linkage, DCRs, and dashboards-as-code (where feasible).
• Coach development and Data/AI teams on platform-aligned deployment patterns and best practices.

Leadership & Delivery Support

• Lead and advise on CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code best practices.
• Support timely and high-quality delivery of platform components, resolving blockers and ensuring governance adherence.
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to capability uplift across the team.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong expertise in Azure DevOps pipeline design, including security and compliance gates.
• Advanced IaC skills (Bicep), modular design, and release versioning.
• Experience in security and compliance automation (Azure Policy, vulnerability scanning tools).
• Proficiency in container build optimization, artifact provenance, and SBOM generation.
• Monitoring and logging enablement (Application Insights, Log Analytics queries).
• Deep knowledge of Azure PaaS services:
• Identity & Security: Entra ID, Key Vault, App Configuration
• Networking & Delivery: Azure Firewall, Azure Front Door
• Monitoring: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics
• Compute & AI: Container Apps, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Services, Azure AI Search
• Data & Storage: Storage Accounts, Cosmos DB, Redis Cache, Container Registry