Principal Applications Engineer

Thales; Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance-related bonus

Half day every Friday

28 days annual leave (plus bank hols)

Private healthcare

Pension scheme

Life cover

24/7 EAP & wellbeing app

Employee discounts

Gym membership discounts

Job summary

Thales is looking for a Principal Applications Engineer to lead the migration of engineering environments to a cloud-based Azure platform. You will deploy and support modern tooling, guide a cross-site team, and ensure reliability during the transition.

Join Thales UK to shape the next generation of engineering environments, collaborating with a Technical Product Owner and Service Delivery Manager to deliver high-quality tooling and automation across multiple UK sites.

Qualifications

• Strong experience in modern DevOps and platform engineering.
• Experience migrating tooling to cloud platforms.
• Ability to lead agile delivery and coach junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and support tools on Thales Azure infrastructure.
• Build or modify deployment solutions with IaC and automation.
• Improve processes through automation for reliability.
• Maintain environments during transition phase.
• Support delivery teams with automated tooling to provision infra.

Skills

Linux admin

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Docker

Python

Ansible

IaC

Cloud infra

Tools

Jenkins

JFrog Platform

GitLab

Atlassian Suite

Siemens Polarion

FlexLM

SonarQube

Black Duck

Coverity

Job description

Location: Crawley, United Kingdom

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.

This role is a Principal Applications Engineer position within Thales UK's engineering tooling team, focused on modernising and migrating the company's engineering environments to a cloud-based Azure platform while maintaining existing toolsets and supporting engineering users throughout the transition.

Location(s):

Crawley or Reading or Cheadle or Bristol or Glasgow or any other Thales site in the UK

Role purpose and context:

Thales is transforming how it delivers tools to its engineers by building the next generation of Engineering Environments on a cloud-based platform. In this role, you will:

• Build and support a modern, cloud-native tooling environment that provides an outstanding experience for engineering teams across the UK.
• Lead migration from legacy on-prem or older tooling to new Azure-based solutions, ensuring continuity of service during the transition.
• Work in an agile development team, collaborating closely with a Technical Product Owner and other stakeholders to plan, prioritise, and deliver improvements.
• Provide coaching and guidance to more junior team members and champion best practices in deployment, automation, and operations.

The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, DevOps, and internal developer experience, with a strong emphasis on reliability, automation, and user satisfaction for engineering teams.

Key responsibilities

Your core accountabilities include:

• Deploy and support industry-leading tools on Thales' cloud-based Azure infrastructure (e.g., CI/CD, artifact management, code quality, licensing).
• Build or modify deployment solutions where off-the-shelf reuse isn't possible, often using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation.
• Improve current processes through automation, reducing manual effort and increasing consistency and reliability.
• Maintain existing environments through the transition phase, ensuring stability for engineering users while new platforms are rolled out.
• Support delivery teams with automated tools and scripts to provision infrastructure resources (compute, network, storage) in a simple and efficient manner.
• Implement operational best practices, including supervision/monitoring, backups, archives, and log management, to ensure robust, secure, and auditable environments.

You’ll maintain principal relationships with engineering users, the Technical Product Owner, Service Delivery Manager, Delivery Manager, and Head of Discipline to align tooling with business needs.

Technical stack and skills

We are looking for strong hands-on experience in modern DevOps and platform engineering technologies. Highly desirable skills include:

• Linux administration and scripting
• CI/CD methodologies and pipeline design
• Kubernetes and Docker for containerisation and orchestration
• JFrog Platform (Artifactory/XRay) for artifact and dependency management
• GitLab for source control and CI
• Ansible for configuration management and automation
• Python for scripting and tooling
• Virtual Machines and cloud infrastructure concepts

Plus experience in any of the following is a strong advantage:

• Atlassian Suite (Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence)
• Siemens Polarion (requirements/ALM)
• FlexLM License Server
• Black Duck SCA, Coverity, SonarQube (security and code quality)
• Jenkins (CI/CD)

Benefits:

• Performance-related bonus
• Half day every Friday, usually finishing around 13:00
• 28 days annual leave (plus bank holidays) with opportunity to buy up to 40 hours/year (pro rata)
• 24 hours volunteering paid for
• Private healthcare
• Pension scheme
• Life cover
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program and access to mental wellbeing app
• Employee discount shopping schemes on major brands and retailers
• Gym membership discounts

Security Clearance Requirement:

Due to the nature of the work that we do at Thales, many of our roles are subject to security restrictions. This role requires you to be a UK National and achieve Security Clearance (SC) without any caveats. It would be advantageous if currently held, however, if not currently held, it is a requirement that the successful applicant undergo, achieve, and maintain SC Clearance prior to commencing employment. If approved by the MOD, a dual national from a non-ITAR country may be considered.

To be eligible for full SC, you generally need to have resided in the UK for the last 5 years. In some circumstances, a minimum of 3 years' residence in the UK over the last 5 years may be accepted, with additional overseas checks.

Please visit the UKSV website for further guidance:

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At Thales, we ensure equal opportunities, pay and working conditions for all. The benefits we offer include private medical insurance, buying or selling annual leave, cycle to work schemes, employee discounts, paid volunteering day, stocks and shares, annual bonus and much more depending on the role. Read more about our benefits here.

We are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued for who they are and the unique strengths they bring. Discover more about our programmes, employee networks, wellbeing policies, and inclusive features here.

Join Thales in the UK - Innovate with us and shape the future!