Job Title: Lead DevOps Engineer (Azure)
Location: Largely remote with travel to customer site two days a month
Security Clearance: Current UK SC Clearance required
Rate: Up to £700 - £725 a day Inside IR35

The Opportunity
A chance to play a pivotal role in a major Defence / MOD / Government transformation programme. This is 3 month with strong possibility of extension until 2027. Inside IR35 contract pays up to £700 per day via an Umbrella company and places you at the centre of a complex, high-stakes delivery environment.

The Role
The programme is progressing at pace, but now requires a Lead DevOps leader to ensure the engineering, automation, and platform delivery pipelines are cohesive, secure, and production-ready. Several critical capabilities remain to be architected and implemented.

This role demands a Lead DevOps Engineer who has deep experience with Azure, extensive hands-on expertise with Terraform, and a track record of enabling high-performing Agile/DevSecOps teams.

You will take charge of defining DevOps patterns, shaping IaC best practice, refining CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring environments can be deployed, scaled, and operated with confidence.

Main Responsibilities

As part of a SAFe Agile DevSecOps Scrum team, you will:

• Architect, build, and maintain Azure cloud environments using Terraform as the primary IaC tool.
• Create and maintain reusable Terraform modules, manage state securely, and enforce IaC governance and standards.
• Design and optimise CI/CD pipelines to support automated testing, secure deployments, and environment consistency.
• Drive DevOps best practices across the programme, enabling automation, observability, configuration management, and resilience.
• Implement secure-by-design principles across the platform, aligning with MOD/government security expectations.
• Participate in Scrum ceremonies, collaborate on requirement shaping, and support risk identification and mitigation.
• Work closely with security, platform, software, and systems engineering teams to ensure integrated delivery.
• Support cross-training initiatives to strengthen DevSecOps capability across the wider programme.

The Person

• UK Citizen with current UK SC Clearance.
• Senior-level Lead DevOps Engineer with extensive experience in large-scale Azure environments.
• Expert-level hands-on experience with Terraform, including:
  • module design and reusable patterns
  • state management and workspace strategy
  • environment automation and orchestration
  • enforcing IaC standards across teams
• Strong background in CI/CD engineering with tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar.
• Solid understanding of Agile/DevSecOps principles and the broader software delivery lifecycle.
• Proficient with supporting tools such as GitHub, SonarQube, Robot, TestRail, Ansible, and Unix Bash scripting.
• Able to analyse complex systems, coordinate installations or upgrades, and plan platform transitions.
• Strong communicator capable of working with cross-functional teams, customers, Scrum Masters, and security stakeholders.
• Broad hands-on knowledge of Azure services spanning compute, networking, identity, security, logging, and monitoring.