Senior DevOps Engineer

London, Greater London, England
Competitive
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London, Greater London, England
Contract

Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer

Location: Remote-first, UK (occasional travel for team/customer sessions)
Contract: Initial 6-month contract (strong likelihood of extension)
Rate: Competitive (Outside IR35)
Start Date: ASAP — urgent requirement
Clearance: Active SC clearance required — must be held now, not in progress

Overview

Are you looking to take genuine ownership of a platform layer, not just keep the lights on? This role offers exactly that.

We're looking for an experienced Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure and platform layer of an Azure-hosted SaaS platform used by major contractors, universities, financial institutions and UK public sector organisations, including secure environments. The platform has grown quickly and the infrastructure beneath it needs real engineering attention — Terraform coverage is incomplete, documentation is thin, and the platform has never been load tested. This is a genuine ownership role for someone who wants to fix an imperfect platform and set the standard, not inherit something pristine.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the Azure infrastructure estate across UK, EU and Australian environments.
  • Design, build and maintain modular, conventional Terraform infrastructure as code.
  • Own the GitOps deployment model and enforce it as the only route to production.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, including self-hosted runners.
  • Provision isolated, short-lived environments on demand (dev, QA, demo, customer-specific).
  • Lead decommissioning of the residual AWS estate.
  • Establish load/stress testing, identify performance ceilings, implement auto-scaling.
  • Design resilience improvements including multi-region auth and failover.
  • Migrate background job processing to a managed message broker.
  • Implement monitoring, alerting and observability.
  • Own the security posture: access control, secrets management, network design, encryption, audit.
  • Build and prove a disaster recovery capability against agreed RTO/RPO.
  • Support deployment into customer-controlled and accredited environments, including UK public sector.
  • Document the estate properly — architecture, modules, runbooks, build guides. This is a core deliverable, not an afterthought.
  • Mentor the team and reduce developers' need for direct production access.

Requirements

  • Active SC clearance, held now — non-negotiable, first-round screening criterion.
  • Deep, current, hands-on Azure at production scale, including:
    • App Service, Azure SQL, Functions, Storage
    • Networking, identity, Key Vault
    • Monitoring / observability tooling
  • Expert Terraform, with demonstrable experience refactoring an inherited, poorly structured estate into something modular and maintainable — be ready to give a specific example.
  • Azure DevOps pipelines including self-hosted agents; Git.
  • Strong in PowerShell or Bash
  • Linux and Windows Server.
  • Load and performance testing, monitoring/observability, incident diagnosis, disaster recovery planning.
  • Secrets management, least-privilege access design, network segmentation, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging.
  • A genuine, evidenced record of writing documentation — be ready to show examples during interview.

Desirable

  • Experience delivering into UK government, defence or otherwise accredited environments.
  • Azure Service Bus or equivalent managed messaging; multi-tenant SaaS / database tenant isolation patterns.
  • Azure AD B2C or equivalent managed identity; SSO and federation.
  • AWS experience (useful for the decommission, not required beyond it); cost optimisation / FinOps practice.
  • Comfortable reading and writing application code in TypeScript/Node.js or C#

Why Join?

  • Genuine, senior ownership of a platform layer — not a ticket-taking role.
  • Executive backing and budget already committed to fixing the estate properly.
  • Visibility that comes from a small, senior engineering team close to the product.
  • Direct relevance to secure and regulated UK public sector delivery.
  • Outside IR35 contract, six-month initial term with strong extension potential.

Apply

If you hold active SC clearance and want genuine ownership of a platform that needs fixing rather than a mature estate to maintain, we'd love to hear from you. Apply today for a confidential discussion.