DevOps Lead - 12 Months - Hybrid - Inside IR35

Locations: Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield (3 days per week onsite)

The Role

We're seeking an experienced Digital DevOps Lead to drive DevOps strategy, engineering excellence and operational stability across a major government digital programme.

This is a leadership-focused position where you'll own the DevOps capability for multiple products and services, helping shape engineering standards, cloud strategy and automation practices while providing technical leadership to a team of DevOps Engineers.

Working closely with Engineering and Architecture leadership, you'll be responsible for ensuring platforms are secure, scalable, resilient and fit for purpose, with a strong focus on availability, quality and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of DevOps Engineers, providing coaching, mentoring and technical guidance
• Define and implement DevOps strategy, standards and best practices across products and teams
• Drive automation initiatives and promote a strong DevOps culture
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, platform reliability and operational performance
• Design and manage reusable libraries, templates, tooling and services
• Work closely with Engineering, Architecture and Product stakeholders to deliver strategic objectives
• Support delivery teams by breaking down complex requirements into actionable technical solutions
• Champion knowledge sharing, documentation and engineering best practice across the wider community
• Provide technical advice and recommendations to senior stakeholders
• Contribute to medium and long-term technology strategies and roadmaps

Essential Experience

• Strong DevOps leadership experience within large-scale digital environments
• Proven experience working with AWS and/or Azure
• Experience with Microsoft Fabric
• Strong stakeholder management and engagement skills
• Experience driving DevOps adoption, automation and engineering best practices
• Ability to influence technical strategy and lead engineering teams

Desirable Experience

• Networking and infrastructure expertise
• Experience with GitLab
• Experience working within complex enterprise or public sector environments

What's on Offer

• Opportunity to lead DevOps strategy on a high-profile government digital programme
• Long-term 12-month engagement
• Collaborative engineering environment with significant technical ownership
• Opportunity to shape engineering standards, automation practices and cloud strategy across multiple services