SC Cleared DevOps Engineer | Contract
Kubernetes | CI/CD | Platform Enablement | Outside IR35

SR2 is supporting a critical national security programme, and are looking for an experienced DevOps / Platform Engineer to join a well-established Platform Engineering team, acting as an enabler across multiple product teams. This role suits someone confident operating autonomously, able to challenge requirements constructively, and comfortable working in secure, complex environments.

The Role
You’ll work closely with application and product teams to gather requirements, evaluate tooling, and design, build, and maintain platform services that allow teams to own and operate their services end-to-end. You’ll also contribute to the wider DevOps community, helping evolve standards and best practices in line with modern technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Enable product teams to adopt DevOps practices through platform tooling and standards
• Design, implement, and maintain Kubernetes-based platforms and containerised services
• Build and support CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code solutions
• Provision and maintain environments across secure defence platforms
• Support operational issues and improve platform reliability and usability
• Contribute to shared services, documentation, and reusable components
• Engage with stakeholders, confidently challenging requirements where needed

Essential

• Strong experience with Kubernetes
• Helm for application deployment and configuration
• CI/CD pipeline design and implementation
• Linux systems administration
• Version control systems (ideally GitHub)
• Building, maintaining, and operating containerised workloads
• Infrastructure-as-code and Bash scripting
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work autonomously or in small teams

Desirable

• OpenShift
• Terraform/Packer/Vault
• Ansible
• Prometheus/Grafana/Splunk
• Containerised data and messaging services (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Keycloak, ELK)
• YAML-based pipelines and immutable infrastructure

The Details

• Contract role
• Outside IR35
• Initial 6 months, but a multi-year programme.
• Location: Portsmouth
• On-site: 1–2 days weekly
• Start date: ASAP
• Clearance: SC

If you’re a DevOps or Platform Engineer with strong Kubernetes experience and enjoy enabling teams while working on high-impact defence programmes, please apply for immediate consideration.