Principal DevOps Engineer

Salary: £? - ? per year

Requirements:

• Current SC Clearance.
• Strong AWS platform engineering experience, including EC2, RDS and API Gateway; Transit Gateway experience is highly beneficial.
• Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience.
• Experience designing, implementing and supporting Jenkins and CI/CD pipelines.
• Docker and containerised platform experience.
• Linux administration experience.
• Platform engineering and infrastructure ownership experience.
• Knowledge of technical governance, assurance and engineering standards.
• Live service management and 24/7 operational support experience.
• Incident, change and problem management experience.
• Experience leading engineering and cross-functional teams.
• Major incident management experience.
• Experience supporting secure, business-critical services.
• Experience with GitLab, PostgreSQL, NGINX, VPN/OpenVPN, Elastic/Kibana and Windows administration.
• Desirable: C#, .NET, JavaScript, React, Vue.js and microservices experience.
• Desirable: AWS SageMaker, AI/LLM integrations and Python-based analytics tooling.
• Desirable: Enterprise cloud architecture and secure-by-design principles.
• Desirable: Disaster recovery and business continuity planning experience.
• Desirable: Experience supporting COTS products in secure environments.
• Desirable: Knowledge of intelligence, policing or law-enforcement platforms.
• Desirable: Experience with SOLAR, MAT or similar analytical platforms.
• Desirable: Experience in government, national security or other highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across AWS platforms, infrastructure, applications and live services.
• Define engineering standards, governance and technical assurance processes.
• Lead engineering strategy, roadmaps and service modernisation initiatives.
• Own platform reliability, operational resilience and service performance.
• Lead major incident response and support critical 24/7 services.
• Manage technical risks, dependencies and architectural decisions.
• Coordinate delivery across engineering, development, operations and supplier teams.
• Mentor engineers and support engineering capability development.
• Support secure, business-critical services within Agile and DevOps delivery environments.

Technologies:

• AI
• API
• AWS
• C#
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Docker
• EC2
• GitLab
• Incident Management
• Support
• JavaScript
• Jenkins
• Kibana
• LLM
• Linux
• Nginx
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• React
• Security
• Terraform
• VPN
• Vue
• Windows
• microservices
• ASP.NET

More:

We are recruiting a Principal DevOps Engineer for one of our local clients. This is a Principal Engineer role focused on AWS Platform Engineering, providing technical leadership across a large-scale platform estate and multiple teams and suppliers. The contract is for six months or longer, pays £644 per day inside IR35, and is remote with occasional meetings. Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited acts as an employment agency for permanent recruitment and an employment business for the supply of temporary workers. Applying is subject to the applicable terms and conditions, privacy policy and disclaimers.

last updated 39 week of 2026