Software Development Specialist

6 month contract - £607 per day via umbrella (Inside IR35) - DV Clearance

Key Details

• Location: London, Cheltenham, Ipswich, or Manchester - Hybrid, 3 days in the office, can be any of those locations.
• Contract: 6-month contract
• Pay Rate: £607 per day via umbrella (Inside IR35)
• Security Clearance: DV cleared - MANDATORY!!
• Clearance Allowance: Owing to the sensitive nature of this role, you will be required to undergo DV-level (Developed Vetting) security clearance checks.

About the Organization

When it comes to keeping everyone safely connected, we deal with thousands of cyber-attacks every day, so that millions of people can go about their daily lives and run their businesses safely. We deliver vital work at scale, with real breadth and impact. You’ll be joining a specialist security team that is a trusted partner to governments worldwide, protecting critical national infrastructure and committed to the safety and security of our nation and global communities. Everyone has access to unparalleled professional and personal development opportunities, and your contribution will always be valued.

Role Overview

The purpose of this role is to create, lead and implement significant technical solutions that could impact internally and/or externally. You will create and implement technical solutions for a domain or cross domains / portfolios of work within a specific technology area autonomously, understanding how solutions impact systems internally and/or externally and assessing the impact of change. You will provide technical quality assurance over the work of other engineers through a matrix team structure. You will provide sound technical expertise to consult on significant components of a technical solution within a specific domain or cross domain. You will identify opportunities to improve standards of practice within a project, continuously enhancing ways of working. You will deliver resolutions to problems that tend to be complex, cross-domain or of high impact to customers. We intend to expand our team extensively, so we would love to connect with people who have strong IT and engineering skills, and a genuine passion for building, designing, and securing modern technology platforms.

Role Accountabilities

• Own and deliver engineering platform capabilities that enable teams to build, test, secure, and deploy services in a highly-automated, CI/CD-driven environment.
• Design, implement, and evolve CI/CD pipelines, ensuring consistent, reliable, and repeatable delivery processes across multiple teams and services.
• Embed Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices, driving standardisation, scalability, and elimination of manual provisioning and configuration drift.
• Integrate security controls into engineering workflows, ensuring services are secure by design and comply with the highest standards, from initial build through to production.
• Support and enable engineering teams, providing guidance, tooling, and best practices to improve delivery velocity, quality, and resilience.
• Continuously optimise automation, identifying opportunities to remove repetitive manual tasks, reduce cycle times and improve developer experience.
• Collaborate across development, security, and operations spheres, breaking down silos and promoting end-to-end ownership of services.
• Maintain and improve engineering tooling and platforms, including source-code control systems, build systems, artifact repositories and deployment frameworks.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, and observability.
• Support incident response and problem resolution, ensuring rapid recovery and continuous improvement through feedback loops and retrospective sessions.

Skills & Experience

• Stakeholder management and interaction.
• Requirements capture, analysis, and design work.
• Issue management and technical documentation via the Atlassian suite, SharePoint, MS-Word, etc.
• Agile Development Principles utilizing Scrum or Kanban.
• Coaching and mentoring.
• Security principles including Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability (CIA), Least Privilege, and Zero Trust.
• Software and system validation, verification and test.
• Single- or multi-tier software application development utilizing Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, or C#.
• Database technologies and ORM such as Elastic, MySQL/MariaDB, and SQL Server.
• Spec-driven software development and MCP use including Kiro or Claude.
• Source-code control utilizing Git and Git-based technologies such as GitOps.
• CI/CD platforms such as GitLab or Jenkins.
• Configuration management and IaC frameworks including Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
• Containerisation and container platforms including Kubernetes and Helm-based management and deployment.
• Cloud-native platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP, or VCF.
• Artifact and package management utilizing Nexus, Artifactory, or Harbor.
• Observability utilizing Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Fleet, or Defend.
• Identity and access management including IAM, OAuth/OIDC via Keycloak, and Secrets Management via Vault.
• Automated testing frameworks.
• Release and deployment automation utilizing ArgoCD or Flux.
• Encryption and certificate lifecycle management including TLS/SSL and PKI.
• OS configuration and management across Linux and Microsoft Windows.