Lead AWS DevOps Engineer (SC CLEARED)

Job Title: DevOps Lead / Platform Engineering Lead Location: Remote (w/ monthly office days - expenses paid if coming from outside M25 corridor) Start Date: ASAP – 31/12/26 (Extensions likely) IR35 Status: Inside IR35 Industry: Government Interview Process: MS Teams, 1 Stage We are seeking an experienced DevOps Lead to support the development and scaling of a cloud-native platform within a large, complex engineering environment. This role requires a hands-on technical leader who can define best practices, influence architecture, and drive a platform-first approach across multiple teams. The successful candidate will operate at both a strategic and hands-on level, contributing directly to platform design while enabling engineering teams through scalable, well-defined tooling and processes.

Key Responsibilities Design, build, and evolve a scalable platform on AWS Lead the adoption of platform engineering principles and best practices Manage and optimise Kubernetes-based infrastructure Define and implement observability frameworks, including logging, monitoring, and alerting Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automation frameworks Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform Collaborate with engineering teams to improve developer experience and delivery efficiency Provide technical leadership and guidance across DevOps and platform initiatives Support incident management, root cause analysis, and system reliability improvements Required Skills and Experience Extensive experience in DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering roles Comfortable with an ‘opinionated’ approach to leading DevOps work Strong hands-on expertise with AWS cloud services Proven experience building or scaling platform engineering solutions Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes in production environments Experience with observability tooling (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog) Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent) Experience working in large-scale or enterprise environments Strong problem-solving and analytical skills Ability to influence technical direction and challenge existing approaches