Salary: £76,117 (National) plus skills allowance of up to £19,483 pending assessment.
Location: Manchester or Sheffield on a hybrid basis
Advert Close: 11:55 pm Monday 11th May 2026
Please note that this role requires Security Check (SC) clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years.
What you’ll bring to the role
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.
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.
You'll have a visible passion for
- 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).
What’s in it for you
- A civil service pension with employer contribution rates of at least 28.97%.
- In-year reward scheme for one-off or sustained exceptional personal or team achievements.
- The ability to potentially adopt flexible working options that suit your work/life balance, plus the opportunity in future to take a career break.
- 25 days annual leave on appointment, rising with service.
- Eight days public holidays, plus one additional privilege day.
- 26 weeks maternity, adoption or shared parental leave at full pay, followed by 13 weeks statutory pay and a further 13 weeks unpaid, after qualifying service.
- Maternity and adoption support leave (also known as paternity leave) of two weeks full pay, after qualifying service.
- Paid leave for fostering approval processes, support when a child is substantively placed with you plus a foster to adopt policy.
- Support for guardians and kinship carers.
- Corporate membership of ‘Employers for Carers’ providing additional information and advice for carers, plus a ‘Carer’s Passport’ to discuss workplace needs and underpin supportive conversations.
- Time off to deal with emergencies and certain other unplanned special circumstances.
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