Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer – 6-Month Contract Location: Manchester, UK – Hybrid (2 days per week in the office) Contract Duration: 6 months Day Rate: £350–£450 per day, Inside IR35 Job Type: Contract Role Overview We are seeking an experienced Senior DevOps Engineer to design, build and operate secure, scalable and resilient cloud platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure automation, CI/CD, observability and platform security. You will work closely with engineering, architecture, security and operations teams to improve developer experience, accelerate software delivery and establish consistent engineering standards across enterprise platforms. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on Kubernetes experience, including OpenShift, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, observability and cloud-native security, with the ability to build reusable platform capabilities and automate operational processes. Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain enterprise Kubernetes platforms using GKE and OpenShift, including cluster lifecycle management, networking, ingress and workload security.
• Develop reusable infrastructure modules and automate cloud environment provisioning using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code principles.
• Design, implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Harness and Jenkins, supporting secure and reliable software releases.
• Develop Internal Developer Platform capabilities using Backstage, enabling developer self-service, reusable templates and golden paths.
• Implement end-to-end observability using Dynatrace, including metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting and service health monitoring.
• Define and implement SLI/SLO frameworks to improve platform reliability, availability and operational performance.
• Engineer service connectivity and traffic management using Istio Service Mesh, including ingress/egress controls and policy enforcement.
• Manage secrets, certificates and workload identity using HashiCorp Vault and automated certificate lifecycle management.
• Embed security controls, least-privilege access, secure configuration and auditability into platform engineering practices.
• Automate operational runbooks, incident response activities and remediation to reduce manual intervention.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure and production issues, supporting platform resilience and service availability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to establish engineering standards, share knowledge and drive platform adoption. Essential Skills and Experience
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes engineering and container platforms.
• OpenShift experience is essential, with GKE experience highly desirable.
• Strong Terraform and Infrastructure as Code experience, including reusable modules and automated provisioning.
• Practical experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or comparable enterprise cloud environments.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Harness and Jenkins.
• Knowledge of Backstage, Internal Developer Platforms, developer self-service and golden path implementations.
• Hands-on experience with Dynatrace and modern observability practices.
• Experience with Istio Service Mesh, service-to-service connectivity, traffic management and network security.
• Experience with HashiCorp Vault, secrets management, certificate management and workload identity.
• Strong understanding of IAM, least-privilege access, secure configuration and platform governance.
• Proficiency with GitHub/Git workflows, scripting and automation.
• Strong troubleshooting skills and experience supporting production-grade systems. Desirable Experience
• Experience working within large, complex or regulated enterprise environments.
• Exposure to multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
• Scripting experience with Bash, Python or PowerShell.
• Knowledge of SRE principles, incident management, capacity planning and resilience engineering.
• Experience with cloud cost optimisation, platform telemetry and operational automation. What Success Looks Like
• Secure, resilient and repeatable cloud platforms with clear engineering standards.
• Improved deployment frequency and release reliability through automation.
• Enhanced developer experience through self-service platform capabilities.
• Improved service availability through actionable observability and measurable SLOs.
• Reduced operational overhead through automated remediation and standardised runbooks. Contract Details
• Duration: 6 months
• Location: Manchester, UK
• Working Model: Hybrid – 2 days per week in the Manchester office
• Rate: £350–£450 per day, Inside IR35 If you have strong enterprise DevOps and platform engineering experience and are looking for a hands-on contract opportunity, we would welcome your application.