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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