Senior DevOps Engineer

### Posting ID
PIP11622

On behalf of The Ministry of Justice we are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer (Inside IR35) for a 6 month contract. Hybrid working based in any MOJ UK office.

PLEASE NOTE: SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be willing & eligible to undergo checks. Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position (short-term nature of this role and speed at which we require a postholder in situ) preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance.

The Observability Platform team, part of Justice Digital and Data Science (JDDS) at the Ministry of Justice, is building a new, central observability platform from scratch. Our first customer is Cloud Platform, the Kubernetes-based hosting platform behind many Justice Digital services. From there, we will expand to teams across the Office of the CTO (OCTO) and wider JDDS. Today many teams run their own separate monitoring tools. We are bringing metrics, logs and traces together into one consistent, secure, UK-hosted service, so teams can understand how their services behave, spot problems early and recover faster.

As a Senior Engineer you will help evaluate and stand up its core tooling, onboard the first tenant teams and set the patterns others will follow. You'll collaborate closely with the Cloud Platform team, engineers in service teams, security colleagues, technical architects and our product manager , who share our vision of making justice services more reliable and easier to run.

Essential:

- Have hands-on experience designing, building and operating observability tooling for metrics, logs and traces, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and OpenTelemetry, or commercial equivalents such as Datadog.
- Have experience running and instrumenting workloads on Kubernetes in production, including Helm, telemetry agents and collectors, and cluster-level monitoring.
- Have experience operating production systems on a major public cloud provider such as AWS, Azure or GCP (we mainly work in AWS).
- Have experience managing infrastructure as code (for example Terraform) and delivering changes through Git-based workflows and CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions.
- Have experience building platforms used by many teams, including multi-tenancy, access control , self-service onboarding, and managing data volume, retention and cost.
- Have experience defining SLIs and SLOs, building useful dashboards, and designing alerting that reduces noise and supports effective incident response.
- Have experience using a programming or scripting language such as Python, Go or Bash to automate tasks, build integrations or extend tooling.
- Have a systematic, evidence-led approach to evaluating tools and designs, weighing cost, security, data residency and operational effort, and recording decisions clearly.
- Understand how to handle telemetry securely, including keeping personal and sensitive data out of logs and traces.
- Have experience working openly across disciplines, communicating clearly with technical and non-technical colleagues, and sharing knowledge through documentation, pairing and mentoring.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

Disability Confident

As a Disability Confident employer, MOJ encourage applications from disabled and neurodivergent candidates . Applications from candidates who identify as having a disability and meet the essential criteria for the role will be prioritised for review. Where application volumes are high, additional role-specific and desirable criteria may be applied as part of the shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

Armed Forces Covenant

As a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant, MOJ welcome applications from veterans, service leavers, reservists and military spouses or partners. Applications from eligible candidates who meet the essential criteria for the role will be prioritised for review. Where application volumes are high, additional role-specific and desirable criteria may be applied as part of the shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".