Lead DevOps Engineer

DWP Digital; Newcastle upon Tyne; Hybrid; GBP 56,000 - 93,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Flexible hours

Pension contributions 28.97%

Generous holidays

Career development

Job summary

DWP Digital in the United Kingdom is seeking an expert DevOps lead to define and drive DevOps standards across the organisation. You will guide CI/CD pipelines, IaC practices, and cloud adoption, enabling teams to deliver reliably at scale.

You’ll mentor engineers, partner with product and platform teams, and shape our usage of Azure, Kubernetes, GitLab, Argo and Helm. This hybrid, flexible role offers generous pension contributions and a balanced work life.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading DevOps across multiple teams in an agile environment.
• Proven ability to define and scale CI/CD across services.
• Strong IaC and cloud platform expertise (Azure).

Responsibilities

• Define and drive DevOps standards across the organisation.
• Lead the design and scale of CI/CD pipelines and IaC practices.
• Mentor DevOps engineers and collaborate with product teams to improve platforms.

Skills

DevOps leadership

CI/CD pipelines

Infrastructure as code

Azure cloud

Kubernetes

Mentoring

GitLab/Jenkins

Scripting (Bash/Python)

Tools

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Terraform

Argo

Helm

Azure

Kubernetes

Job description

Pay up to £92,522 plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and great work life balance.

This is a real and significant DevOps role in the UK's largest government department. Here you will have the freedom and autonomy to drive the development of our technical landscape and define what DevOps looks like in DWP

DWP. Digital with Purpose.

You’ll be a leading, expert voice in a DWP Digital community that is driving a once-in-a-generation transformation of public services.

We have a unique purpose, putting better, more efficient services in the hands of DWP users. The scale of our engineering challenge is also huge:

• We have 1bn lines of code in over 12,000 code repos and 90+ programming languages.
• We run around 294 days' worth of testing every day through automation.
• Our APIs receive 173 million requests, and we spin up 280,000 AWS servers every month.
• Over 22 million people - 1/3 of the UK's adult population access our services daily.
• Over 100,000 colleagues and agents use the kit, tools and systems we roll out. We build and maintain systems behind payments worth over £195bn payments annually.

What skills, knowledge and experience will you need?

• Significant experience working across multiple teams as a DevOps specialist, defining standards and ensuring best practices are adopted across the whole organisation.
• Experience of line-managing, mentoring and supporting DevOps engineers in multi-disciplinary teams in an agile environment.
• Significant experience of version control systems as well as building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g. git with GitLab CI or Jenkins).
• Significant experience of Infrastructure-as-code and configuration of code for one or more cloud providers.
• Experience of containerisation and container orchestration.
• Experience of multiple scripting or programming languages (e.g. Bash, Python).
• Significant experience of the full life cycle of Azure cloud-based platforms and applications from designing, through deployment to supporting and operating in production, test and development environments.

You and your role

A typical day in this role could start with helping a team troubleshoot a Kubernetes deployment in Azure, before moving into a discussion on how to improve engineering standards across multiple products. Later, you might be mentoring a DevOps Engineer, reviewing a Terraform design, or working with senior leaders to shape the future direction of our platforms and teams.

You’ll spend your time enabling others to succeed, championing DevOps culture, and helping teams take ownership of the infrastructure they build and run. One day you’ll be improving how we use technologies like AKS, GitLab, Argo and Helm. The next, you’ll be supporting recruitment, developing engineering capability, or helping define the standards that keep our services secure, resilient and scalable.

Location: You’ll join us in one of our brilliant digital hubs in Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester Newcastle or Sheffield, whichever is most convenient for you.

Hybrid Working: We work a hybrid model - you’ll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face to face in a hub.

Pay: We offer competitive pay of up to £92,522.

Pension: You’ll get a brilliant civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%, worth over £21,000 per year.

Holidays: A generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time.

You can also take up to 3 extra days off a month on flexi-time. You’ll also get all the usual public holidays.

We have a broad benefits package built around your work-life balance which includes:

• Flexible working including flexible hours and flex-friendly policies
• Time off volunteering and charitable giving
• Bring your authentic self to work with 'I Can Be Me in DWP'
• Discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more
• Interest-free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket, so it’s even easier for you to get to work and start making a difference
• Professional development, coaching, mentoring and career progression opportunities.

And we have an award-winning environment and culture:

• DWP have been recognised as 2024 Diversity Employer of the Year at the Computing Women in Tech Excellence awards
• Diverse and Inclusive Leadership at Digital Leaders Awards 2024
• Commended as Best Place to Work in Digital category in the Computing Digital Technology Leaders awards 2025
• Recognised as one of the Best Public Sector Employers at 2025 Women In Tech Employer Awards

Process:

We know your time is valuable, so our application and selection process are just two stages:

Interview: a single stage interview online.