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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