Job Description
Principal DevOps Engineer
Location: National*
Closing Date: 21st February
Interviews: after w/c 9th March
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 refer to the T&Cs at the bottom):
London: £75,674 - £93,025 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,351)
National: £71,381 - £88,900 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,519)
Working pattern: full-time, part-time, flexible working
Contract Type: Perm
Vacancy number: 14659
*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
The Role
We are recruiting a Principal DevOps Engineer to join the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) and provide technical leadership and guidance across engineering teams in Justice Digital.
OCTO sets technical direction across the organisation. It defines standards, shapes platforms and ways of working, and supports teams to build and operate services that are secure, reliable and sustainable.
This role focuses on improving how engineers work by defining standards and ensuring they are implemented through shared tooling rather than guidance alone. You will lead central teams responsible for Developer Experience (DevX) and the Developer Portal, working closely with platform, security and architecture teams.
Alongside this, you will hold Head of Profession responsibility for DevOps, supporting professional practice and capability development across the organisation.
This role aligns against the Principal DevOps engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework
To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025
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 and Azure
- Infrastructure as code: Terraform
- Containerisation and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
- Source control and CI/CD: GitHub, GitHub Actions
- Languages: Go, Python, JavaScript, PHP
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
Technical and organisational leadership
- Provide senior technical leadership on DevOps and platform engineering practices, including CI/CD design, infrastructure as code, environment strategy and operational tooling
- Work with the Chief Engineer, other heads of profession, engineers and architects across Justice Digital to help shape technical direction and long-term technical strategy
- Act as a technical escalation point for complex platform, CI/CD or operational issues
- Maintain hands-on engagement with DevOps and platform tooling to retain technical credibility
Developer experience (DevX)
- Lead the DevX team and set priorities for work that improves how engineers build, test, deploy and operate services
- Define organisation-wide standards for engineering practice and ensure they are implemented through shared tooling, particularly via GitHub
- Own and maintain the golden path for delivery, providing supported repository structures, workflows and patterns that teams can adopt
- Identify recurring sources of friction in build, deployment and operational workflows and address them through changes to tooling or defaults
- Keep DevX standards and tooling under review, evolving or retiring them as engineering practice changes
Developer portal
- Lead the development and ongoing operation of a central Developer Portal, modelled after:
- Ensure the portal provides a clear and practical entry point for engineers to find approved tooling, standards, templates and guidance
- Use the portal to support onboarding, making it easier for new teams and engineers to understand how to work within Justice Digital
- Work with platform, security and architecture teams to ensure content reflects current ways of working and organisational requirements
- Establish an operating model for the portal so content remains accurate, maintained and trusted over time
Head of profession – DevOps
- Provide Head of Profession leadership for the DevOps Engineer role
- Support capability development, progression and consistency of DevOps practice across Justice Digital
- Build and sustain a DevOps community of practice
If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!
Benefits
- 37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
- A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
- Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow.
- Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates).
- 25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the King’s birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
- Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!
- Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
- Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT.
- Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location).
- Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.
- 5 days volunteering paid leave.
- Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.
Person Specification
Essential:
- Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer in modern software delivery environments.
- Demonstrable understanding of Git-based delivery workflows as used by engineering teams, including pull request models, code review practices, CI/CD integration points and release patterns.
- Experience owning the design, build or ongoing operation of shared platform capabilities (such as deployment platforms, pipeline frameworks or developer tooling), with accountability for their reliability, scalability and lifecycle management.
- Experience making and owning decisions about engineering standards, including what to standardise, where flexibility is appropriate, and how trade-offs were managed.
- Hands-on experience configuring and operating source control and CI/CD tooling at scale, implementing workflows, protections and automation that support agreed engineering standards.
- Experience setting technical direction across teams by evaluating options, reviewing approaches and exercising technical judgement on complex engineering problems while keeping stakeholders and engineers motivated and on-side.
- Ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to different audiences and use that understanding to shape decisions, as well as frame risks, trade-offs, and options in a way that helps senior leaders and non-specialists reach sound conclusions.
- Experience considering wider organisational goals, constraints and dependencies when shaping or recommending engineering approaches, balancing local team needs with long-term, system-level outcomes.
- Experience providing leadership within organisation-wide technical communities, centres of excellence or working groups, contributing to their establishment, direction and governance in collaboration with other stakeholders.
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.
Why join Justice Digital
Justice Digital 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. 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, and remain closely connected to real technical problems through hands-on engagement with tooling and platforms.
How to Apply
- Candidates must submit a CV and a Supporting Statement (up to 750 words), which describes how you meet the requirements from the essential criteria set out below:
- Significant, recent hands-on experience working as a DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer in modern software delivery environments.
- Demonstrable understanding of Git-based delivery workflows as used by engineering teams, including pull request models, code review practices, CI/CD integration points and release patterns.
- Experience setting technical direction across teams by evaluating options, reviewing approaches and exercising technical judgement on complex engineering problems while keeping stakeholders and engineers motivated and on-side.
- Experience considering wider organisational goals, constraints and dependencies when shaping or recommending engineering approaches, balancing local team needs with long-term, system-level outcomes.
- Experience providing leadership within organisation-wide technical communities, centres of excellence or working groups, contributing to their establishment, direction and governance in collaboration with other stakeholders
Please note, failure to provide the documents as requested for the specific role, will result in a rejection of your application.
- A diverse panel will review your application against those requirements above.
- Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 90-minute panel interview held via video conference. Candidates will also be required to provide a 7-minute presentation with 5 additional minutes for panel questions during the interview stage. Details of the presentation will be sent across prior to interview, with sufficient notice for candidates to prepare.
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.
In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:
- Leadership
- Communicating and influencing
- Developing self and others
- Seeing the big picture
- Making effective decisions
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.
Application Guidance
Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply and how to complete a Personal Statement
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.
Please Note
Recruitment Process Notice
This role is being delivered in partnership with PeopleScout, our managed recruitment service provider. As part of the recruitment process, your personal data will be shared with PeopleScout for the purposes of candidate assessment, communication, and selection.
PeopleScout will process your data on behalf of the Ministry of Justice in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Your data will be handled securely, used only for recruitment purposes, and retained only as long as necessary.
The Ministry of Justice processes your personal data under the lawful bases of:
- Contractual necessity – to assess and progress your application,
- Legal obligation – for checks such as right to work,
- Legitimate interest – to improve recruitment processes and ensure fair selection.
You have the right to:
- Access your personal data,
- Request correction or deletion,
- Restrict or object to processing,
- Request data portability.
Your data will be retained for up to 12 months following the recruitment process or the duration of the appointment, whichever is shorter, after which it will be securely deleted.
For more information on how your data will be used and your rights under data protection law, please refer to our https://justice.gov.uk/privacy or contact the MoJ Data Protection Team at data.protection@justice.gov.uk
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
