Full-time (Permanent) National: £60,300 - £66,330 London: £64,300 - £70,730 plus £20,100 additional allowance
Published on 19 September 2025 Deadline 1 October 2025

Location

Croydon CR0 2WF, Manchester M5 3LZ, Sheffield S3 8NU

About the job

Job summary

We are looking for people who are passionate about Engineering to join our community led team in Shared Applications Service (SAS). You will work in agile multidisciplinary teams with over 200 engineers in a modern cloud environment using the latest technologies. Our purpose as a team is to bring technical understanding in-house for over 600 Home Office applications.

You could be creating and maintaining some of the most critical public services in the United Kingdom and transforming how we use data and technology to improve these. We are responsible for designing, building and supporting solutions to help people prove their identity or apply for visas. You could also be working on critical IT systems that support policing and counter terrorism, which helps protect UK borders.

The Senior DevOps Engineer ensures service reliability and performance bymaintaining, designing, and building key components in line with standards, ensuring security and effective monitoring. Collaborating with architects and teams, they clarify design constraints, workforce needs, and cost implications during discovery phases.

They provide guidance on CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) pipelines, enabling efficient and secure deployments for new users, ensuring automation, and streamlined software delivery processes.

They share common responsibilities in automation, reliability, and infrastructure management with other DevOps colleagues.

The Senior DevOps Engineer will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers in technical tasks, as well as support recruitment and assessment activities.

Tools and Technologies we use:

We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including:

• Data: PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Neo4J, Amazon Athena

What you will do

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Supporting teams in mapping their stories to available platforms, ensuring effective and secure service deployment.
• Developing and maintaining hardened base containers, undertaking skilled platform build and support activities.
• Identifying gaps in best practices, advising teams on delivery risks and recommending improvements.
• Assisting engineers with service topology discovery, helping define quality assurance (QA) and deployment pipelines.
• Driving adoption of new tools and technologies, improving teams’ integration approaches.
• Developing and enhance support processes, ensuring better user experience and operational efficiency.

Like many organisations we need to maintain our services 24/7, therefore, on occasions there may be a requirement to work out of hours, for which you will be paid an additional allowance.

Person specification

UK residency and security requirements-You need to have lived in the UK for the past 5 years.

Essential skills criteria

You’ll have a demonstrable passion for DevOps culture, with the following skills or strong experience in:

• Leading the design, implementation, and review of complex cloud solutions using AWS or Azure, ensuring alignment with best practices for architecture and scalability.
• Driving the implementation of automated testing, scanning, and code analysis tooling, and providing guidance on best practices to ensure continuous integration and code quality.
• Identifying and enforcing the use of processes, procedures, and tooling for application monitoring, ongoing maintenance, and incident response to ensure high availability and performance.
• Devising and leading the implementation of data management processes and standards for cloud resources, covering areas like naming, tagging, metadata management, backups, and documentation for compliance and efficiency.
• Designing, coding, testing, maintaining, and documenting scripts and infrastructure-as-code definitions to automate build, deployment, and provisioning activities, enhancing operational workflows.
• Specifying and leading the implementation and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines, ensuring alignment with best practices to facilitate automated and efficient deployment cycles.

SFIA capability framework

Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all engineering levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework:All skills A–Z — English (sfia-online.org)

We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process.

SFIA levels of responsibility – Use the SFIALevels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each Technical Skill listed below.

SFIA Technical Skills

The essential technical skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework. Please see below for the relevant skills required for your role.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Systems integration and build (SINT) - Level 4