Job summary
This role sits within the DevOps team that underpins one of the Home Office’s most critical operational systems, providing AWS centric environments, tooling, and engineering practices that enable secure, resilient and high performing digital services at scale.

The Head of DevOps role provides senior technical and strategic leadership across this space, sitting at the intersection of infrastructure engineering, platform operations, delivery, and assurance. The role is central to enabling the delivery of the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) Programme, supporting  this complex programme while simultaneously maintaining business critical live services.  The role ensures that platforms and environments are secure, resilient, automatable and fit for both change and scale, while enabling delivery teams to move faster with confidence.

Within the LEDS Programme, the role works closely with architecture, engineering, security, service management, and suppliers to ensure that platform capability, resilience and operability are designed in and maintained. It is also a key leadership role in shaping DevOps culture, standards and ways of working across LEDS and adjacent programmes.

Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of  60% of their working time in the office. Applicants can raise any queries to the email address at the bottom of the advert.

Watch this short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital.

Job description
As Principal DevOps, you are responsible for key elements of our platforms, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) pipelines and overall automation approaches. Your role is to support the delivery, update or evolution of these systems as well as to provide expert technical advice. You will also be expected to set the technical direction for our future platforms, be this through hands on delivery or design.

You will frequently collaborate with and take part in planning with senior business stakeholders to ensure that security, stability and capacity are embedded in the development and deployment of services. You will identify and explore opportunities for technology service and business improvement.

We would especially encourage applications from candidates with strong experience in:

• AWS, account management, tagging, security policies.
• Kubernetes, particularly EKS, and cluster plugins.
• Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform with experience of Helm charts.
• Amazon data service such as Aurora, S3 and Opensearch.
• Networking knowledge such as Route 53, Privatelink, Load Balancers and VPCs.
• CI/CD tooling such as GitLab and Jenkins
• Observability and monitoring tooling such as Prometheus, Alertmanager and Cloudwatch. Grafana Dashboarding.

Person specification
Main Responsibilities

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Lead complex platform build, maintenance and evolution activities, acting as the technical expert in your area.
• Design and develop new platforms and systems, setting guidance, standards and reusable patterns for others.
• Own and drive the DevOps strategy across the LEDS Shared Infrastructure Team, aligned to Home Office Digital standards and roadmaps.
• Enable and support delivery teams through effective DevOps tooling, automation, CI/CD pipelines and self‑service capabilities.
• Be accountable for the reliability, resilience, performance and operational effectiveness of services supporting critical national systems.
• Drive continuous improvement across deployment reliability, observability, recovery and environment consistency.
• Act as a senior technical advisor to programme boards, design authorities and assurance forums, providing clear technical direction.
• Lead, develop and inspire a high‑performing DevOps engineering team, embedding modern DevOps culture across governance, security, risk and compliance

Working Pattern 

This role is available on a full-time basis with the option of compressed hours working.  This role is also suitable for part-time working hours, with a minimum requirement to work 3 days per week due to business requirements.

Essential Skills

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

• Setting the direction for DevOps solution design, securing stakeholder buy‑in and approval, and overseeing delivery through to implementation, providing hands‑on support where required to de‑risk outcomes (SWDN).
• Setting expectations for operational automation and CI/CD practices, guiding the appropriate use of scripting and programming to deliver secure, maintainable and auditable DevOps tooling (PROG).
• Ensuring effective automated testing strategies are embedded across platforms to validate resilience, security and operational behaviour, providing confidence for live, national‑critical services (TEST).
• Overseeing the delivery of automated build and deployment pipelines, ensuring consistent integration, controlled promotion across environments and reliable release into live service (SINT).
• Providing assurance that data management practices covering backup, recovery, access control and data handling—meet audit, regulatory and policing requirements (DATM).
• Accountable for the effective support of live services, ensuring incidents are diagnosed and resolved efficiently across AWS and Kubernetes platforms, recovery is increasingly automated, and service stability is maintained (ASUP).

SFIA capability framework  

The essential skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework (based on the industry standard SFIA framework).  Use the SFIA Levels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each technical skills listed below.

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

• Software design (SWDN) – Level 5
• Programming/software development (PROG) – Level 4
• Testing (TEST) – Level 4
• Systems integration and build (SINT) - Level 5
• Data management (DATM) – Level 4
• Application support (ASUP) – Level 4