DV Infrastructure/Software Engineer (IT) / Contractor

Free-Work UK; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 111,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

Free-Work UK is seeking a DV Infrastructure/Software Engineer to own and deliver platform capabilities for scalable, automated services in a security-conscious environment. The role focuses on building, testing, securing, and deploying services with strong CI/CD practices.

Key tasks include designing CI/CD pipelines, embedding IaC, integrating security controls, supporting teams with tooling, and driving observability and automation across the engineering stack.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering CI/CD pipelines across multiple teams.
• Proficient in IaC and automation tooling.
• Security controls integrated into engineering workflows.
• Strong collaboration across development, security, and operations.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver engineering platform capabilities.
• Design and evolve CI/CD pipelines across teams and services.
• Embed IaC practices to standardise, scale, and automate provisioning.
• Integrate security controls into engineering workflows.
• Support engineering teams with tooling and guidance to improve delivery velocity.
• Optimise automation and reduce cycle times.
• Collaborate across development, security, and operations to promote end-to-end ownership.
• Maintain and improve engineering tooling and deployment frameworks.
• Drive modern engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, and observability.
• Monitor platform performance using deployment metrics and reliability signals.
• Contribute to technical standards and governance across teams.
• Support incident response and problem resolution with rapid recovery.
• Document and share knowledge to scale engineering capability.

Skills

CI/CD

IaC practices

Security engineering

Observability

Platform automation

Tools

Git/GitOps

Terraform

Kubernetes

Jenkins/GitLab CI

Prometheus/Grafana

Job description

DV Infrastructure/Software Engineer

Office days - minimum 3

Location - London, Manchester, Ipswich, and Cheltenham.

Security - DV

Rate £600 - £750

Inside IR35

Role

• Own and deliver engineering platform capabilities that enable teams to build, test, secure, and deploy services in a highly-automated, CI/CD-driven environment.
• Design, implement, and evolve CI/CD pipelines, ensuring consistent, reliable, and repeatable delivery processes across multiple teams and services.
• Embed Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices, driving standardisation, scalability, and elimination of manual provisioning and configuration drift.
• Integrate security controls into engineering workflows, ensuring services are secure by design and comply with the highest standards, from initial build through to production.
• Support and enable engineering teams, providing guidance, tooling, and best practices to improve delivery velocity, quality, and resilience.
• Continuously optimise automation, identifying opportunities to remove repetitive manual tasks, reduce cycle times and improve developer experience.
• Collaborate across development, security, and operations spheres, breaking down silos and promoting end-to-end ownership of services.
• Maintain and improve engineering tooling and platforms, including source-code control systems, build systems, artifact repositories and deployment frameworks.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, and observability.
• Monitor and improve platform performance and reliability, using metrics such as deployment frequency, lead-time, failure rates, and recovery times.
• Contribute to technical standards and governance, ensuring consistency, security, and best-practice across engineering teams.
• Support incident response and problem resolution, ensuring rapid recovery and continuous improvement through feedback loops and retrospective sessions.
• Document and share knowledge, building reusable patterns, templates and guidance in order to scale up engineering capability.

Technical

• Single- or multi-tier software application development (Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, C#, etc)
• Database technologies & ORM (Elastic, MySQL/MariaDB, SQL*Server, etc)
• Spec-driven software development & MCP use (Kiro, Claude, etc)
• Source-code control (Git & Git-based technologies e.g. GitOps)
• CI/CD platforms (GitLab, Jenkins)
• Configuration management & IaC frameworks (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• Containerisation & container platforms (Kubernetes, Helm-based management & deployment)
• Cloud-native platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, VCF)
• Artifact & package management (Nexus/Artifactory/Harbor)
• Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Fleet, Defend)
• Identity & access management (IAM, OAuth/OIDC e.g. Keycloak, Secrets Mgmt e.g. Vault)
• Automated testing frameworks
• Release & deployment automation (ArgoCD, Flux)
• Data-streaming & integration platforms (Kafka, NiFi)
• Load-balancing and proxies (Nginx, HAProxy, ALB)
• Encryption & certificate lifecycle management (TLS/SSL, PKI, etc)
• OS configuration & management (Linux, Microsoft Windows)
• System administration/diagnosis/troubleshooting
• Networking (DNS, NAT, IP-addressing, TCP/UDP, routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs, etc)

Due to the nature and urgency of this post, candidates holding or who have held high level security clearance in the past are most welcome to apply. Please note successful applicants will be required to be security cleared prior to appointment which can take a minimum 18 weeks. LA International is an award-winning partner of choice for many of the world's most influential companies and government organisations. Holding Enhanced Government Security Accreditation, we are recognised as the European market leader in the delivery of Security Cleared talent to organisations that demand the very highest levels of security, compliance and assurance.

An award-winning organisation, having secured the prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade over multiple years. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable and accessible workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We welcome applications from all individuals, regardless of background or identity, and we encourage candidates who may not meet every listed requirement to still apply. If you require any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to ensure a fair and accessible experience.

Please Note: If a high volume of applications is received, only candidates shortlisted will be contacted.