Lead DevOps Engineer

Location: National*

Closing Date: 19^th June 2026

Interviews: Week Commencing 6^th July 2026

Grade: 6

(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary**: (for more information, please see below):

London: £75,674 - £85,257 (which may include an allowance of up to £13,489)

National: £71,381 - £80,419 (which may include an allowance of up to £13,619)

Working pattern: full-time, part-time, flexible working

Contract Type: Permanent

Number of vacancies: 2

Vacancy number: 18598

*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP

Please note that unless you are an existing member of staff at Justice Digital, Data and Science, the only London location being recruited to is 10 South Colonnade, E14 4PU. We are no longer recruiting to 102 Petty France, SW1H 9AJ.

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We are recruiting two Lead DevOps Engineers to join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), working within the Chief Architect function. These roles will provide technical leadership for DevOps and platform engineering across strategic technology platforms that enable the Ministry of Justice to deliver secure, reliable and scalable digital services.

OCTO sets technical direction across the organisation. It defines standards, shapes shared platforms and ways of working, and supports teams to build and operate systems that are secure, reliable and sustainable.

As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will help shape and operate critical platform capabilities that support delivery across the organisation. You will establish and promote modern engineering practices, ensuring platforms are resilient, observable, secure and easy for teams to use. Working closely with engineers, architects, product managers and delivery teams, you will help create the environments, tooling and operational processes needed to support effective software delivery at scale. Justice Digital, Data and Science exists to support the delivery of justice through modern, reliable and secure digital services. We work in multidisciplinary teams, focus on user needs, and take a pragmatic approach to technology that balances pace with long-term sustainability.

You will join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, a central function that sets technical direction across Justice Digital, Data and Science. OCTO works closely with delivery teams, platform teams and senior leaders to define standards, shape shared platforms and improve how engineering is done across the organisation.

This role offers the opportunity to operate at organisational scale, influence how engineering works across Justice Digital, Data and Science, and remain closely connected to real technical problems through hands-on engagement with tooling and platforms.

The roles are aligned to two key strategic areas:

Integration Hub

We are establishing a new integration hub to enable more consistent, reusable and governed approaches to how systems interact across the MoJ estate. This role will play a key part in shaping how that platform is built and operated, ensuring it supports modern integration patterns such as APIs, event-driven architecture and messaging.

You will be responsible for ensuring the platform and related services are operable, reliable and secure, with the tooling, environments and practices needed for teams to build, deploy and run integrations effectively. You will help establish strong engineering practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability and operational controls that support consistent and scalable integration delivery across the organisation.

Justice Data Factories

The second role will focus on Justice Data Factories, our federated data architecture initiative. Justice Data Factories provide agency-specific environments where data is ingested, transformed and published as trusted data products, enabling domains across the Ministry of Justice to take greater ownership of their data while operating within a consistent, governed architectural framework.

You will play a key role in developing and operating the platform capabilities, infrastructure and engineering practices that underpin this ecosystem. Working closely with data engineers, architects and product teams, you will ensure the platform is secure, scalable and reliable, while driving improvements in automation, CI/CD, observability and operational resilience to support the delivery of data products at scale.

Both roles offer the opportunity to influence organisation-wide technology platforms, shape engineering standards and practices, and contribute to the delivery of modern, reusable capabilities that support the Ministry of Justice's digital and data ambitions.

This role aligns against the Lead DevOps engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework

You’ll receive a range of excellent benefits when you join our department, including:

• A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
• 25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
• Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours. Designed to support a positive work–life balance.

You can find more details of the Benefits we offer here. To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

Our Tech Stack

We use a broad range of technologies and are looking for people with strong practical experience in modern software delivery environments.

• Cloud platforms: AWS
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform
• Containerisation and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Source control and CI/CD: GitHub, GitHub Actions
• Languages: Python

You will be supported to deepen your knowledge of our platforms once in post.

Our work is largely open source. You can explore repositories at:
https://github.com/ministryofjustice

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering, development and continuous improvement of strategic platforms, including infrastructure, environments and deployment pipelines.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automation to enable teams to build, test and deploy services quickly, safely and consistently.
• Work directly in code and infrastructure (for example Infrastructure as Code) to ensure platforms are robust, secure and maintainable.
• Build and evolve shared platform capabilities that support the delivery and operation of digital and data services across the organisation.
• Ensure platforms are designed for high availability, scalability and resilience, with appropriate approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Implement and improve observability, including logging, metrics and tracing, to enable effective monitoring and operational support.
• Provide technical leadership and practical support to engineering teams, helping them make effective use of platform capabilities, tooling and environments.
• Work closely with engineers, architects and product teams to ensure services are deployable, operable and production-ready.
• Take ownership of platform reliability, performance and operational excellence in production environments.
• Support incident response, troubleshooting and root cause analysis, driving continuous improvement through automation, tooling and platform enhancements.

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Person Specification

Essential:

• Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or similar, building and operating cloud-native platforms or services in production.
• Hands-on experience building and operating container-based platforms (e.g. Kubernetes) in production, including deploying and managing distributed systems.
• Experience using infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) to provision and manage scalable, reliable environments.
• Experience implementing and operating observability tooling (logging, monitoring, alerting, tracing) to support reliable services in production.
• Understanding of how to design and operate platforms that support integration patterns such as APIs, event-driven systems and messaging.

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.

Six Months in – Building the Women in Engineering Working Group.

Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

Salary Information**

Base salary for this role is from £71,381 to £80,419 (National) or from £75,674 to £85,257 (London).

• New entrants to the Civil Service joining the MoJ are expected to start at the minimum of the pay band.
• Existing Civil Servants moving on a level transfer will retain their current base salary or move to the minimum of the pay band for the role, whichever is higher.
• Existing Civil Servants who are promoted will either move to the bottom of the new grade’s pay band or receive a 10% uplift, whichever provides the greater increase.
• Candidates may also be eligible for a non‑pensionable Government Digital & Data Allowance of up to £12,201 per year (London) or £12,319 (National). This is a temporary allowance, reviewed annually and may be retained, amended, or withdrawn.

The final offer will reflect the skills and experience you demonstrate during the assessment process.

How to Apply

In Justice Digital, Data and Science, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We shall assess a combination of your Experience, Technical skills and Behaviours during the assessment process.

Stage 1 - Application and sift:

To apply for this position, you must submit the following as part of your application:

• A CV detailing your career history (including any relevant qualifications). Your CV will be assessed against the essential criteria outlined within the Person Specification of this advert.
• A Personal Statement (no more than 750 words) which should outline your experience and skills, giving clear examples of work undertaken. It should specifically address the following 5 criteria listed below:

• Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or similar, building and operating cloud-native platforms or services in production.
• Experience using infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) to provision and manage scalable, reliable environments.

A diverse sift panel will review the information in your CV and Personal Statement to assess the sift criteria specified above. We operate an anonymous shortlisting process. Please ensure your CV and Personal Statement do not include your name or any other identifying details.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on “Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer in modern software delivery environments” and “Hands-on experience configuring and operating source control and CI/CD tooling at scale, implementing workflows, protections and automation that support agreed engineering standards” will be conducted before the sift.

Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply - Application Guidance

Stage 2 - Interviews:

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a panel interview held via Microsoft Teams. At interview stage, you will be assessed against the following Success Profile elements - Experience, Technical and the following Behaviours:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Making Effective Decisions
• Leadership

As part of your interview, you will be asked to deliver a 7-minute presentation with 5 additional minutes for panel questions that assesses your technical capability. Further details will be provided if successful at sift.

Appointments are made strictly in merit order. In the event that two or more candidates receive identical interview scores, the Seeing the Big Picture behaviour will be applied as the primary lead criterion to determine the final merit order.

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application.

A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms and Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact digitalanddatarecruitment@justice.gov.uk