14659 - Principal DevOps Engineer

Location: National

Closing Date: 21st February

Interviews: after w/c 9th March

Grade: 6 (MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary: London: £75,674 - £93,025 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,351); National: £71,381 - £88,900 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,519)

Working pattern: full-time, part-time, flexible working

Contract Type: Perm

Vacancy number: 14659

We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office.

The Role

We are recruiting a Principal DevOps Engineer to join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) and provide technical leadership and guidance across engineering teams in Justice Digital. OCTO sets technical direction across the organisation. It defines standards, shapes platforms and ways of working, and supports teams to build and operate services that are secure, reliable and sustainable. This role focuses on improving how engineers work by defining standards and ensuring they are implemented through shared tooling rather than guidance alone. You will lead central teams responsible for Developer Experience (DevX) and the Developer Portal, working closely with platform, security and architecture teams. Alongside this, you will hold Head of Profession responsibility for DevOps, supporting professional practice and capability development across the organisation.

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

Our Tech Stack

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

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

• Technical and organisational leadership
  • Provide senior technical leadership on DevOps and platform engineering practices, including CI/CD design, infrastructure as code, environment strategy and operational tooling.
  • Work with the Chief Engineer, other heads of profession, engineers and architects across Justice Digital to help shape technical direction and long-term technical strategy.
  • Act as a technical escalation point for complex platform, CI/CD or operational issues.
  • Maintain hands‑on engagement with DevOps and platform tooling to retain technical credibility.
• Developer experience (DevX)
  • Lead the DevX team and set priorities for work that improves how engineers build, test, deploy and operate services.
  • Define organisation‑wide standards for engineering practice and ensure they are implemented through shared tooling, particularly via GitHub.
  • Own and maintain the golden path for delivery, providing supported repository structures, workflows and patterns that teams can adopt.
  • Identify recurring sources of friction in build, deployment and operational workflows and address them through changes to tooling or defaults.
  • Keep DevX standards and tooling under review, evolving or retiring them as engineering practice changes.
• Developer portal
  • Lead the development and ongoing operation of a central Developer Portal.
  • Ensure the portal provides a clear and practical entry point for engineers to find approved tooling, standards, templates and guidance.
  • Use the portal to support onboarding, making it easier for new teams and engineers to understand how to work within Justice Digital.
  • Work with platform, security and architecture teams to ensure content reflects current ways of working and organisational requirements.
  • Establish an operating model for the portal so content remains accurate, maintained and trusted over time.
• Head of profession – DevOps
  • Provide Head of Profession leadership for the DevOps Engineer role.
  • Support capability development, progression and consistency of DevOps practice across Justice Digital.
  • Build and sustain a DevOps community of practice.

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

Benefits

• 37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part‑time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
• Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow.
• Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024.
• 25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the King’s birthday.
• 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave.
• Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
• Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT.