Senior DevOps - HMRC - G7

Location

Bristol Regional Centre - 3 Glass Wharf
Telford - Plaza 1 and 2
Newcastle Upon Tyne - Benton Park View

About the job

Job summary

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it’s really like to work at HMRC.

  

Visit our YouTube channel to watch the full series and come and discover your potential.

Do you thrive on keeping critical platforms running smoothly?

Are you passionate about cloud platform operations, security, and automation?

Do you have experience in addressing risks, incidents and service quality across technical teams?

Do you want to play a key role in delivering reliable, secure, and efficient platforms that provide services for millions of citizens?

We are seeking experienced engineers to work within a product team, analysing, designing, developing, automating and delivering either our Core Cloud Platforms or Cloud Shared Services in HMRC's Cloud Environment. You will naturally be a self-starter, adept at working individually or as part of a small team, able to convey technical concepts to a variety of stakeholders.

Within HMRC’s Chief Digital & Information Group (CDIO), specifically in the Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) team we are redefining our offerings and growing the team of outstanding people to improve the Cloud Centre of Excellence. We are already a diverse team of 90+ technologists, creating a dynamic and inclusive working environment whose skills cover architecture, platform development, service design, platform operations and governance.

Travel to Telford is required as part of this role, and 60% of your working time will need to be office based.

Job description

The Role

As a Senior DevOps (Platform Engineer) within HMRC’s Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS), you will be pivotal in delivering robust cloud platform services. Working in a product-centric development environment, you will bring extensive DevOps skills and Site Reliability Engineering awareness to build services and bring them into full production operation. 

As an experienced DevOps/platform engineer, you will act as a technical specialist and mentor to developers, adopting an agile approach to delivery where new services or improvements are delivered collaboratively and incrementally to realise business value at the earliest opportunity. Your development will be through a broad range of CI/CD technologies including GitLab, Ansible, Artifactory, and Jira.

N.B. This role profile acts as a single advert for multiple types of DevOps/Platform Engineers across our Cloud Product Teams, therefore some of the Essential Criteria will be expressed in ‘and/or’ terms.

Person specification

Your responsibilities will include:

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
Remove manual intervention through an automation-first mindset.

CI/CD with GitLab

Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines in GitLab to automate deployments and configuration changes.
Iterate on automated testing, security scanning, and compliance checks within pipelines.
Collaborate across our teams on reusable GitLab CI templates and standardising build/release processes.
Optimise pipeline performance and troubleshoot issues.

Security & Compliance

Apply cloud security according to industry good practice
Support audits and maintain alignment with compliance frameworks

Performance & Cost Optimisation

Analyse value/cost/performance to optimise spend and capacity.

Collaboration & Leadership

Mentor engineers and share best practices across Platform teams.
Partner with platform operation teams to ensure smooth releases.

Essential Criteria

Experience in one or many of the following areas:

Building AWS platforms for enterprise size organisations
Building Azure platforms for enterprise size organisations
Building CI/CD tooling as a service including, Gitlab, Artifactory, Jira, Confluence
Building Security and Secrets Management tooling including, Hashicorp Vault, OpsView
Building Container platforms using AKS, EKS, Kubernetes
Building out Machine Images delivery functions for Linux and Windows images, as well as building out DNS solutions for our cloud estate

Experience in building out Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
Scripting skills (e.g. Python, Go, or Bash) 

Desirable Criteria 

Awareness of FinOps and cloud cost management.
Cloud related certifications
Familiarity with the principles behind ITIL service operations
Contributing to training and development pathways for junior engineers

Behaviours

Mentoring & Technical Leadership

The ideal candidate will demonstrate a proactive approach to mentoring and supporting junior team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth. They will actively contribute to the technical leadership of the team by sharing knowledge, offering constructive feedback, and guiding others through complex problem-solving. Their ability to lead by example, communicate clearly, and encourage collaboration will be key to building a resilient and high-performing engineering culture.

Critical Thinking & Technical Mindset

We’re looking for someone who brings a strong critical thinking mindset to their technical work—someone who doesn’t just follow patterns, but questions assumptions, evaluates options, and makes informed decisions. The successful candidate will approach challenges with curiosity and analytical rigour, balancing innovation with pragmatism. They will be comfortable navigating ambiguity, identifying root causes, and proposing solutions that are both technically sound and aligned with strategic goals. 

Candidate Information Session:

Candidate Information Session - Senior DevOps Engineer - Wednesday  5th November 12pm - 1pm – …

Transitional Sites

For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations.

If your location preference is for one of the following sites, it’s important to note that these are not long-term sites for HMRC and we will require you to move to a new building in the future, subject to our location strategy and the applicable employee policies at that time.

These sites are:

Benton Park View, Newcastle - moving to Pilgrims Quarter, Newcastle
Telford Plaza, Telford - moving to Parkside Court, Telford

You will be given more information about what this means at the job offer stage.

Technical skills

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

Mentoring & Technical Leadership
Critical Thinking & Technical Mindset