Senior DevOps Engineer (DV)

Sanderson Government & Defence; City Of London; On-site; GBP 118,000 - 159,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanderson Government & Defence is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to design, build and operate secure, cloud-native platforms on AWS for a major UK Defence programme in Central London. You will drive DevOps best practices, automate infrastructure and deployment pipelines, and support critical services in a highly secure setting.

You will mentor engineers, engage with senior stakeholders, and lead strategic platform engineering discussions while delivering resilient, observable systems with

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on DevOps or Platform Engineering experience in complex enterprise or government environments.
• Strong AWS expertise across core services, networking, security and platform design.
• Proven Terraform and Infrastructure as Code experience, plus CI/CD tooling expertise.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain scalable AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Develop and enhance Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform.
• Build, optimise and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support rapid and reliable delivery.
• Champion DevOps culture, automation and engineering best practice across delivery teams.
• Improve platform resilience, observability, security and operational performance.
• Work closely with software engineers, architects and senior stakeholders to deliver platform capabilities.
• Support containerised workloads and cloud-native deployments.
• Lead technical discussions, provide guidance to engineers and contribute to strategic decisions around platform engineering.

Skills

DevOps experience

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Python scripting

Bash scripting

Observability

Security in regulated envs

Stakeholder engagement

Tools

Jenkins

GitLab CI

GitHub Actions

Docker

Job description

Senior DevOps Engineer

Active MoD/UKSV DV Mandatory

£750/day Inside IR-35 initially until the end of April 2027

Central London - 3 days/week

We are supporting a major programme within the UK Defence sector and are seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to play a key role in the design, build and operation of secure, cloud-native platforms on AWS.

Working within a highly skilled engineering environment, you will help drive DevOps best practice, automate infrastructure and deployment pipelines, and support the delivery of critical services in a complex and security-conscious setting. This is an opportunity for an experienced engineer who can combine strong technical capability with leadership, mentoring and stakeholder engagement skills.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain scalable AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Develop and enhance Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform.
• Build, optimise and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support rapid and reliable delivery.
• Champion DevOps culture, automation and engineering best practice across delivery teams.
• Improve platform resilience, observability, security and operational performance.
• Work closely with software engineers, architects and senior stakeholders to deliver platform capabilities.
• Support containerised workloads and cloud-native deployments.
• Lead technical discussions, provide guidance to engineers and contribute to strategic decisions around platform engineering.

Required Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands‑on DevOps or Platform Engineering experience within complex enterprise or government environments.
• Strong AWS expertise across core services, networking, security and platform design.
• Proven experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code methodologies.
• Strong CI/CD experience using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or similar.
• Containerisation and orchestration experience, including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Strong scripting and automation skills using Python, Bash or similar.
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging and observability solutions.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience operating in secure or regulated environments.

Desirable Experience

• Previous Defence, MoD or National Security project experience.
• Experience with AWS EKS and modern platform engineering practices.
• Knowledge of DevSecOps principles and cloud security controls.
• Familiarity with Agile delivery environments.
• AWS certifications.

Reasonable Adjustments:

Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.