Lead DevOps Engineer - Ministry of Justice - G6

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We are recruiting two Lead DevOps Engineers to join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), working within the Chief Architect function. These roles will provide technical leadership for DevOps and platform engineering across strategic technology platforms that enable the Ministry of Justice to deliver secure, reliable and scalable digital services.

OCTO sets technical direction across the organisation. It defines standards, shapes shared platforms and ways of working, and supports teams to build and operate systems that are secure, reliable and sustainable.

As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will help shape and operate critical platform capabilities that support delivery across the organisation. You will establish and promote modern engineering practices, ensuring platforms are resilient, observable, secure and easy for teams to use. Working closely with engineers, architects, product managers and delivery teams, you will help create the environments, tooling and operational processes needed to support effective software delivery at scale. Justice Digital, Data and Science exists to support the delivery of justice through modern, reliable and secure digital services. We work in multidisciplinary teams, focus on user needs, and take a pragmatic approach to technology that balances pace with long-term sustainability.

You will join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, a central function that sets technical direction across Justice Digital, Data and Science. OCTO works closely with delivery teams, platform teams and senior leaders to define standards, shape shared platforms and improve how engineering is done across the organisation.

This role offers the opportunity to operate at organisational scale, influence how engineering works across Justice Digital, Data and Science, and remain closely connected to real technical problems through hands-on engagement with tooling and platforms.

The roles are aligned to two key strategic areas:

Integration Hub

We are establishing a new integration hub to enable more consistent, reusable and governed approaches to how systems interact across the MoJ estate. This role will play a key part in shaping how that platform is built and operated, ensuring it supports modern integration patterns such as APIs, event-driven architecture and messaging.

You will be responsible for ensuring the platform and related services are operable, reliable and secure, with the tooling, environments and practices needed for teams to build, deploy and run integrations effectively. You will help establish strong engineering practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability and operational controls that support consistent and scalable integration delivery across the organisation.

Justice Data Factories

The second role will focus on Justice Data Factories, our federated data architecture initiative. Justice Data Factories provide agency-specific environments where data is ingested, transformed and published as trusted data products, enabling domains across the Ministry of Justice to take greater ownership of their data while operating within a consistent, governed architectural framework.

You will play a key role in developing and operating the platform capabilities, infrastructure and engineering practices that underpin this ecosystem. Working closely with data engineers, architects and product teams, you will ensure the platform is secure, scalable and reliable, while driving improvements in automation, CI/CD, observability and operational resilience to support the delivery of data products at scale.

Both roles offer the opportunity to influence organisation-wide technology platforms, shape engineering standards and practices, and contribute to the delivery of modern, reusable capabilities that support the Ministry of Justice's digital and data ambitions.

This role aligns against the Lead DevOps engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework

You can find more details of the Benefits we offer here. To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

Our Tech Stack

We use a broad range of technologies and are looking for people with strong practical experience in modern software delivery environments.

• Cloud platforms: AWS
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform
• Containerisation and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Source control and CI/CD: GitHub, GitHub Actions
• Languages: Python

You will be supported to deepen your knowledge of our platforms once in post

Our work is largely open source. You can explore repositories at: https://github.com/ministryofjustice

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering, development and continuous improvement of strategic platforms, including infrastructure, environments and deployment pipelines
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automation to enable teams to build, test and deploy services quickly, safely and consistently.
• Work directly in code and infrastructure (for example Infrastructure as Code) to ensure platforms are robust, secure and maintainable
• Build and evolve shared platform capabilities that support the delivery and operation of digital and data services across the organisation.
• Ensure platforms are designed for high availability, scalability and resilience, with appropriate approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Implement and improve observability, including logging, metrics and tracing, to enable effective monitoring and operational support.
• Provide technical leadership and practical support to engineering teams, helping them make effective use of platform capabilities, tooling and environments.
• Work closely with engineers, architects and product teams to ensure services are deployable, operable and production-ready.
• Take ownership of platform reliability, performance and operational excellence in production environments.
• Support incident response, troubleshooting and root cause analysis, driving continuous improvement through automation, tooling and platform enhancements.

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Person Specification

Essential:

• Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or similar, building and operating cloud-native platforms or services in production.
• Hands-on experience building and operating container-based platforms (e.g. Kubernetes) in production, including deploying and managing distributed systems.
• Experience using infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) to provision and manage scalable, reliable environments.
• Experience implementing and operating observability tooling (logging, monitoring, alerting, tracing) to support reliable services in production.
• Understanding of how to design and operate platforms that support integration patterns such as APIs, event-driven systems and messaging.

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.