DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer – 9 Month Contract – SC Cleared - Preston

About the role

We are looking for an experienced DevOps Engineer to support the design, automation, and operation of cloud infrastructure for an enterprise data platform and its AI/ML workloads. You will apply strong technical expertise across infrastructure automation, environment provisioning, deployment pipelines, containerisation, and cloud platform operations. The role will involve close collaboration with Data Engineers, MLOps Engineers, Solution Architects, and wider technical stakeholders to ensure platforms and pipelines are reliable, secure, scalable, auditable, and aligned with enterprise cloud governance standards.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, maintain, and support GitLab CI/CD pipelines for frequent and reliable deployments to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Build and maintain Dockerfiles and container image workflows, including publishing images to internal container registries.
• Define and manage secure, scalable AKS cluster configurations for containerised workloads.
• Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform, covering cloud network, security, compute, and supporting platform resources.
• Support orchestration tooling such as Airflow as part of the wider platform capability.
• Manage secrets, configuration, and access controls using Azure Key Vault and Azure Active Directory.
• Support hybrid connectivity between on-premises services and Azure cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure infrastructure is reproducible, reliable, auditable, and fit for use across environments.
• Monitor platform health, logging, and metrics using observability tools such as Azure Monitor, Prometheus, and Grafana where applicable.
• Champion automation, DevOps best practice, platform security, auditing, and cost-aware engineering across the team.

What you’ll bring

• Strong knowledge of Azure cloud platform services and Azure Landing Zone principles.
• Experience with virtual network design, role-based access control, private endpoints, hub-and-spoke networking, and hybrid connectivity.
• Hands-on experience designing and debugging CI/CD pipelines, ideally using GitLab CI/CD.
• Practical experience with Docker and container image build, security, and deployment workflows.
• Experience managing container orchestration platforms, particularly Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Strong infrastructure as code experience using Terraform or similar technologies such as Bicep.
• Understanding of secure coding, secure deployment, auditing, and platform compliance principles.
• Ability to troubleshoot infrastructure, networking, deployment, and platform issues.
• Confident communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across technical and non-technical teams.

Additional responsibilities

• Act as a core contributor within the enterprise data platform team.
• Participate in architecture and technical design discussions.
• Help define infrastructure patterns and contribute to reusable platform modules.
• Support governance processes for introducing new platform capabilities and marketplace requests.
• Contribute to cost optimisation strategies for Azure services and maintain awareness of billing impacts linked to infrastructure usage and deployment frequency.