Principal DevOps Engineer

Hays are now looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer for one of our local clients:

£644 p/d Inside IR35
Remote with occasional meetings
6 month contract+
Candidates must hold current SC Clearance

Principal Engineer - AWS Platform Engineering
We're looking for an SC Cleared Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership across a large-scale AWS platform estate, covering cloud infrastructure, applications, ingest pipelines and live services. You'll act as a senior technical authority, helping drive engineering strategy, governance, operational resilience and delivery across multiple teams and suppliers.

What you'll be doing

• Providing technical leadership across AWS platforms, infrastructure, applications and live services.
• Defining engineering standards, governance and technical assurance processes.
• Leading engineering strategy, roadmaps and service modernisation initiatives.
• Owning platform reliability, operational resilience and service performance.
• Leading major incident response and supporting critical 24/7 services.
• Managing technical risks, dependencies and architectural decisions.
• Coordinating delivery across engineering, development, operations and supplier teams.
• Mentoring engineers and supporting engineering capability development.
• Supporting secure, business-critical services within Agile and DevOps delivery environments.

What we're looking for - Essential

• Strong AWS platform engineering experience, including EC2, RDS and API Gateway (Transit Gateway highly beneficial).
• Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Jenkins and CI/CD pipeline design, implementation and support.
• Docker and containerised platforms.
• Linux administration.
• Platform engineering and infrastructure ownership.
• Technical governance, assurance and engineering standards.
• Live service management and 24/7 operational support.
• Incident, change and problem management.
• Leadership of engineering and cross-functional teams.
• Major incident management experience.
• Experience supporting secure, business-critical services.
• GitLab, PostgreSQL, NGINX, VPN/OpenVPN, Elastic/Kibana and Windows administration.

Desirable

• C#, .NET, JavaScript, React, Vue.js and microservices.
• AWS SageMaker, AI/LLM integrations and Python-based analytics tooling.
• Enterprise cloud architecture and secure-by-design principles.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
• Experience supporting COTS products in secure environments.
• Knowledge of intelligence, policing or law-enforcement platforms.
• Experience with SOLAR, MAT or similar analytical platforms.
• Experience working within government, national security or other highly regulated environments.

If you are currently SC Cleared and you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or send a copy to

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