Software Engineering Tech Lead - Defence Professional Cheltenham, GB

At IBM CIC, we provide technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients in the UK. A career in IBM CIC means you’ll have the opportunity to work with leading professionals across multiple industries to improve the hybrid cloud and AI journey for the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. You will get the chance to deliver effective solutions, driving meaningful business change for our clients, using some of the latest technology platforms. Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success here. You’ll be encouraged and supported to constantly reinvent yourself, focusing on skills in demand in an ever changing market. You’ll be working with diverse teams, coming up with creative solutions which impact a wide network of clients, who may be at their site or one of our CIC or IBM locations. Our culture of evolution centres on long‑term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

We offer:

• Many training opportunities from classroom to e‑learning, mentoring and coaching programs and the chance to gain industry recognised certifications.
• Regular and frequent promotion opportunities to ensure you can drive and develop your career with us.
• Feedback and checkpoints throughout the year.
• Diversity & Inclusion as an essential and authentic component of our culture through our policies and process as well as our Employee Champion teams and support networks.
• A culture where your ideas for growth and innovation are always welcome.
• Internal recognition programs for peer‑to‑peer appreciation as well as from manager to employees.
• Tools and policies to support your work‑life balance from flexible working approaches, sabbatical programmes, paid paternity leave, maternity leave and an innovative maternity returners scheme.
• More traditional benefits, such as 25 days holiday (in addition to public holidays), private medical, dental & optical cover, online shopping discounts, an Employee Assistance Program, life assurance and a group personal pension plan of an additional 5% of your base salary paid by us monthly to save for your future.

In this role, you will work in one of our IBM Consulting Client Innovation Centers (Delivery Centers), where we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients around the world. Our delivery centres offer our clients locally based skills and technical expertise to drive innovation and adoption of new technology.

Your role and responsibilities:

We’re seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to significantly contribute to our DevOps efforts. In this role, you’ll lead smaller projects, guide junior engineers, and shape our technical direction in DevOps practices. You will also actively participate in the entire DevOps lifecycle, focusing on automating and streamlining software delivery pipelines using modern DevOps tools and methodologies.

Responsibilities:

• Working with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Setting up and maintaining monitoring and alerting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios).
• Managing log management and aggregation tools (e.g., ELK Stack, Splunk).
• Understand and implement security best practices in accordance with DevOps principles.
• Implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) processes.

Required education: None

Preferred education: Bachelor’s Degree

Required technical and professional expertise:

• Proven experience in DevOps practices and CI/CD pipeline development.
• Strong scripting and programming skills (e.g., Bash, Python, PowerShell).
• Exposure to containerisation technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Understanding of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
• Excellent knowledge of version control systems (e.g., Git).
• Experience with detecting and resolving security vulnerabilities.

As an equal opportunities’ employer, we welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds. However, for you to be eligible for this role, you must have the valid right to work in the UK. Unfortunately, we do not offer visa sponsorship and have no future plans to do so. You must be a resident in the UK and have been living continuously in the UK for the last 10 years. You must be able to hold or gain a UK government security clearance.

Preferred technical and professional experience:

• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI).
• Familiarity with configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, ELK Stack, Datadog).
• Passion for continuous learning and professional development.

IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration.

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that dedication to our clients' success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment every day, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law.