Apply before 11:55pm on Sunday 19th April 2026
Are you passionate about collaborative working and problem solving? Do you enjoy using your technical skills to help teams work more effectively, and get software into the hands of users with speed and stability? Are you looking for a new role in an organisation that treats you as an individual and supports you on your professional and career development journey? Then this is the role for you!
We have an exciting opportunity for a Lead DevOps Engineer, within the Platform Engineering group, during the IPO digital transformation journey. Working within an established team, this role provides an opportunity to turn innovative ideas into customer value using a range of technologies and delivery platforms.
Key Tech: Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines CICD, Azure, Terraform, scripting, deploying to Azure, and a wide variety of workloads we deploy within Azure such as Azure ML, Elastic and much more.
Working Style
This role will be carried out in-line with IPO Hybrid working arrangements where staff are currently expected to spend at least 20% of their time working onsite from one of our offices. This role is based in our Newport Office.
The requirement for attendance at an office location can vary by role so we would encourage candidates to discuss working arrangements with the recruiting manager to agree a reasonable balance between working from home and the office.
The Lead DevOps Engineer role can be divided into three distinct responsibilities:
* provide hands-on technical leadership and guidance through coaching and mentoring
* lead the sharing of knowledge and good practice
* act as a technical product owner, developing medium to long term strategies for product lines
Managing
* A lead DevOps engineer leads one or a small number of related project teams and contributes to the development of the strategic direction.
Main duties
* Work in one or many cross-functional teams to lead DevOps expertise and decision making across the whole software delivery lifecycle
* Produce and assure DevOps technical designs based on business needs and providing justification for decision-making in chosen technical design.
* Providing deep DevOps technical expertise and DevOps technical leadership to project delivery teams, identifying and selecting appropriate DevOps technical solutions based on user needs and business requirements
* Play an integral part in the DevOps Community of Practice sharing expertise to build the overall capability of the team
* Analyse the impact of DevOps technical choices on business processes
* Enable the reuse of patterns, tools, and components across the DevOps profession
* Provides DevOps technical leadership, guidance, and support for the broader DevOps community.
* Assure that DevOps technical solutions follow all agreed processes and best practises, particularly around security and governance
* Mentor one or more DevOps Engineers supporting them in their professional development as well as using your expertise to guide them in key and critical decision making.
* When needed light line management duties for DevOps engineers.
* Lead on developing, implementing, enhancing and managing technical DevOps practices into the DevOps and Engineering profession
* Leading on alignment of DevOps approaches across the department
* Collaborate with the broader DevOps and Architecture community to ensure that solutions align with target architectures and technology roadmaps
* Contribute to the overall technology strategy and roadmap for both individual projects and IT
* Collaborate with stakeholders, providing direction and challenge to proposals impacting DevOps principles.
* Contributing to decisions and directions in a collaborative team environment, including but not limited to estimations, product planning, user stories (requirement) creation
* Applying a continuous improvement mindset to identify and explore opportunities to improve processes and ways of working
* Engage with Leads across IT, to drive the department strategic vision and collaborate on wider initiatives
* Horizon scanning and continuous research on emerging DevOps principles and best practices.
Person specification
* Strong understanding of DevOps principles and experience of working in a DevOps or iterative development culture.
* Excellent knowledge and proven experience implementing continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) processes and tools, including pipeline design and administration.
* Experience with automated testing and embedding this in CI/CD pipelines.
* Demonstrable experience in service support including troubleshooting and incident resolution.
* Experience in identification and tracking of risks and issues.
* Excellent communication skills and experience of knowledge sharing and mentoring junior members of the team.
* Experience in leading DevOps expertise and decision making across the whole software delivery lifecycle
* Experience in identifying and selecting appropriate DevOps technical solutions based on user needs and business requirements
Technical Essential
* Substantial experience in administration and configuration of Azure DevOps Pipelines (preferred), GitHub Actions or other CI/CD orchestration tools.
* Experience with Infrastructure as Code such as Terraform
* Experience of deploying workloads to, and consuming cloud platform resources (Microsoft Azure preferred).
* Substantial experience supporting the build and deployment of, or coding in one or more of the following or equivalent:
* Python
* .Net Core / C#
* NextJs / Node frontend
* Substantial experience in software development process and tools, and development or scripting experience in one or more of the following:
* Python / Bash / PowerShell
* Experience in containerisation technologies and platforms such as Docker, AKS or Azure container services such as Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps or Azure Container Registry or equivalent.
* Experience in managing and supporting distributed source code repositories including Git.
Alongside your salary of £66,162, Intellectual Property Office contributes £19,167 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
* Unlimited Pluralsight video learning access
* Access to Microsoft’s ESI training suite
* Hybrid working with no core hours
* Substantial support for career progression
* 25 days annual leave moving to 30 days in annual increments
* You will also get 8 days public leave and 1 day privilege leave
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