DevOps Engineer (AWS)

Job summary

The Cabinet Office is the corporate headquarters for the government, employing over 6,000 people in a variety of roles across the UK. In partnership with HM Treasury, we take the lead in certain critical policy areas and support the Prime Minister to ensure the effective running of government.

The Cabinet Office Digital directorate has a crucial role to play in modernising the Cabinet Office through digital transformation. The directorate has approximately 350 staff and is growing in order to meet the demands of the department, and to provide a wider and more mature range of digital, data, technology and security services.

As a member of the Platform Engineering team, you will be responsible for the development, deployment, and ongoing operation of organisational platforms and tools within the Cabinet Office. Your role will involve working closely with the technical product manager and architect to shape platform work and priorities and manage backlogs effectively.

You will operate within an Agile environment, taking a lead role in developing automation tools and ensuring best practices in cloud engineering across the organisation. Your expertise will guide standardisation efforts and promote continuous improvement within the team.

Additionally, you will contribute to Financial Operations (FinOps) activities by providing recommendations to optimise platform expenditure. You will collaborate with stakeholders to optimise their cloud workloads, ensuring efficient and cost-effective use of AWS resources.

The primary focus of this role will be AWS, but you will also develop your skills for Azure, allowing for a multi-functional approach to our platform management.

Job description

As a DevOps Engineer embedded in an Agile team, you’ll:

• Develop, deploy, document and maintain digital platforms, mainly Azure, GitHub, and DevOps tooling and processes.
• Monitor, manage and optimise platform infrastructure to ensure stability, scalability, and performance.
• Implement and promote best practices for cloud engineering, security, and compliance.
• Lead the automation of deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and operational processes.
• Support disaster recovery and business continuity planning for cloud platforms.
• Contribute to FinOps initiatives by analysing costs and recommending optimisation strategies.
• Collaborate with product managers and architects to define platform strategies and priorities.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and contribute to sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Stay up to date with industry trends, service developments, and best practices in the DevOps domain.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior team members.

Person specification

Essential criteria

We want to hear from you if you have:

• Extensive hands-on experience in managing AWS organisation and services like AWS Control Tower, Account Factory for Terraform, and identity management using IAM Identity Centre, Microsoft Entra ID and OKTA.
• Deep understanding of network services (VPC, ALB, NLB, NAT, NACL and Route 53) and security configurations (Security Groups, SCP and KMS),
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks like Terraform and CloudFormation.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to troubleshoot complex cloud infrastructure issues and optimise system performance.
• Strong scripting and automation skills using tools such as AWS Lambda, Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Hands-on experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker and orchestration using AWS ECS and AWS EKS.
• Proven track record in designing, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and experience with tools like AWS CodeBuild, CodePipeline, GitHub Actions and other.
• Experience implementing and managing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems using CloudWatch, CloudTrail, ELK, PagerDuty and other similar tools.
• Practical experience in optimisation of cost and resource utilisation within cloud platforms (FinOps).

Additional information:

Cabinet Office policy is that a minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. For some roles, due to their nature and the business need, this may be up to 100%. Requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together
• Developing Self and Others

We only ask for evidence of these behaviours on your application form:

• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing

Technical skills

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

• Systems design in context of availability and capacity management
• Service integration, information security, monitoring and observability
• Service support and user focus
• Development process optimisation and prototyping

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Systems design in context of availability and capacity management

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £59,207, Cabinet Office contributes £17,152 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• An environment with flexible working options.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• A Civil Service Pension which provides an attractive pension, benefits for dependants and employer contributions of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30.

Things you need to know

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 (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Application process

As part of the application process, you will be asked to provide:

• A CV (Job History and Qualification details)
• A statement of suitability of no more than 500 words
• Behaviour examples covering the following areas:
  • Changing and Improving
  • Communicating and Influencing
• Technical skills examples covering the following areas:
  • Systems design in context of availability and capacity management

Further details around what th