Automation Engineer

Are you ready to make a real impact in a dynamic, high-stakes environment?

We're looking for a talented Automation Engineer to join our diverse team within the Aerospace, Defence, and Security sector. This is your chance to blend your software engineering and operations skills to drive automation, monitor system performance, and enhance infrastructure at scale.

In this vital role, you’ll be at the forefront of ensuring our systems are high-performing, resilient, scalable, and secure. Your expertise will help power some of the most critical operations in the country.

This position supports one of our secure accounts. Ideally, you will already hold active SC clearance or higher. Ultimately, the role requires Developed Vetting (DV) clearance, so eligibility to obtain DV is essential.

There is a requirement to attend site 5 days a week with scope to work remotely at our offices in Farnborough, Hampshire.

We can offer great career progression, flexible benefits and excellent development opportunities.

What you will be doing:

• Collaborating as part of a cross-functional team to provide operational and engineering support for a large-scale secure cloud service.
• Domain orchestration. Developing workflows and tooling to automate processes and operations. Ensuring routine tasks are consistent, repeatable and scalable.
• Provisioning, managing and optimising infrastructure.
• Maintaining observability of the platform. Responding to alerts and incidents to ensure the availability of systems, interoperability and applications. Completing root cause analysis.
• Continually improving systems and processes to improve the efficiency of the service.
• Participating in change management and capacity planning activities.

What you will bring:

• Strong Windows and Linux sysadmin expertise.
• Proficient with one or more high level programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, C#, C++, Go or Java.
• Competent with multiple scripting languages such as PowerShell, Bash or SQL.
• Background working with enterprise orchestration tooling, including the Aria Automation suite or Rundeck.
• Background working with virtulisation platforms to include VMWare Cloud Foundation stack or Proxmox.
• Familiarity with Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code (Iac), including supporting tooling such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Experience building Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, along with supporting tooling such as Gitlab.
• Knowledge of system interoperability and application interfaces. E.g. RESTful, API, Swagger.
• Networking and database administration know-how.

It would be great if you had:

• Comprehension of Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Microservices. To ensure the service remains modular and responsive.
• Enterprise Containerisation and Orchestration insight, including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Understanding of methodologies such as Agile, DevSecOps, Scrum and Kanban. As well as the ability to put them into practice.
• Awareness of the Secure By Design framework with the ability to put it into practice.

If you are interested in this role but not sure if your skills and experience are exactly what we’re looking for, please do apply, we’d love to hear from you!

Although this role is advertised as full-time, we support different ways of working and can offer a range of flexible working arrangements. So, if you’re interested and need to work flexibly, we encourage you to apply and talk to us about what might be possible.

Employment Type: Full-time

Location: Farnborough – on-site at least 3 days, likely 5 days a week

Security Clearance Level: Eligible for SC and DV clearance

Salary: up to £65,000 dependent on experience.

Benefits: £5,400 car allowance, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy additional days, private medical, life assurance, pension, and generous flexible benefits fund (3% of base salary)

Although this role is advertised as full-time, we believe that flexibility at work can promote work/life balance, increase your motivation, reduce stress and improves performance and productivity. We support different ways of working and can offer a range of flexible working arrangements. So, if you’re interested and need to work flexibly, we encourage you to apply and talk to us about what might be possible.

Loved reading about this job and want to know more about us?

Sopra Steria’s Aerospace, Defence and Security business designs, develops and deploys digital solutions to Central Government clients. The work we do makes a real difference to the client’s goal of National Security, and we operate in a unique and privileged environment. We are given time for professional development activities, and we coach and mentor our colleagues, sharing knowledge and learning from each other. We foster a culture in which employees feel valued and supported and have pride in their work for the customer, delivering outstanding rates of customer satisfaction in the UK’s most complex safety- and security-critical markets.