Lead DevOps

📋 Job Overview

Methods is a £100M+ IT Services Consultancy that has partnered with a range of central government departments and agencies to transform the way the public sector operates in the UK. Established over 30 years ago and UK-based, we apply our skills in transformation, delivery, and collaboration from across the Methods Group, to create end-to-end business and technical solutions that are people-centred, safe, and designed for the future.

🏢 About Methods

Our human touch sets us apart from other consultancies, system integrators and software houses - with people, technology, and data at the heart of who we are, we believe in creating value and sustainability through everything we do for our clients, staff, communities, and the planet. We support our clients in the success of their projects while working collaboratively to share skill sets and solve problems. At Methods we have fun while working hard; we are not afraid of making mistakes and learning from them. Methods was acquired by the Alten Group in early 2022.

🎯 The Role

The role is heavily AWS platform engineering focused. While Azure and DevSecOps experience are valuable, the day-to-day work is centred on designing, maintaining and improving AWS-hosted Identity platforms running on Kubernetes and ECS. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will be expected to lead by example, mentor engineers, influence technical decisions and own services throughout their lifecycle.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Developing infrastructure using Terraform
• Maintaining reusable Terraform modules
• Developing and maintaining Helm charts
• Supporting and evolving reusable Helm chart libraries
• Deploying services to ECS and EKS
• Supporting the ECS platform
• Writing and maintaining GitLab CI pipelines and reusable pipeline templates
• Writing and maintaining automated tests for infrastructure, platform code and supporting applications
• Integrating automated testing into GitLab CI pipelines
• Investigating and resolving test failures
• Performance, load and stress testing using JMeter and k6
• Supporting production services
• Investigating incidents and performing root cause analysis
• Reviewing merge requests
• Participating in technical design discussions
• Writing and maintaining technical documentation
• Producing Spike investigations and implementation proposals
• Writing Jira stories, technical tasks and Spike tickets
• Improving automation and engineering standards
• Working with application developers to support deployments
• Maintaining AWS platform components
• Mentoring engineers
• Leading Agile ceremonies when required
• Driving continuous improvement across the platform and engineering practices

📌 Required Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience across AWS services including ECS, EKS, EC2, IAM, Auto Scaling Groups, KMS, CloudHSM, Secrets Manager, Systems Manager Parameter Store, CloudWatch
• Strong Terraform experience including writing production-quality Terraform, creating reusable modules, managing environments using Workspaces, and following engineering standards
• High level of Kubernetes knowledge including deploying applications on Amazon EKS, troubleshooting workloads, working with Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps and Secrets, understanding RBAC, resource requests and limits, Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, Network Policies, and Kubernetes troubleshooting
• Extensive experience with Helm including writing charts, maintaining existing charts, building reusable templates, managing values across environments, and debugging Helm deployments
• Significant knowledge of ECS including Services, Task Definitions, Auto Scaling Groups, Capacity Providers, Deployment strategies, and Operational troubleshooting
• Experience with Docker including building images, writing Dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, image optimisation, and container troubleshooting
• Experience with GitLab and GitLab CI including writing pipelines, maintaining reusable components, managing multi-stage deployment pipelines, pipeline troubleshooting, secure secret handling, and build and deployment automation
• Experience with testing and quality engineering including writing and maintaining Terraform Tests, Go-based tests for Helm charts, application tests, automated tests for Python tooling and applications, understanding test coverage, integrating automated tests into GitLab CI pipelines, troubleshooting failing automated tests, building reusable testing stages, running tests locally and within CI/CD pipelines, performance testing using JMeter and k6, and integrating performance testing into GitLab CI pipelines
• Knowledge of identity and security including OAuth 2.0 flows, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWTs, API authentication, IAM, and Kubernetes RBAC
• Experience with API Gateway including routing, authentication plugins, OIDC integration, rate limiting, upstream configuration, and troubleshooting gateway behaviour
• Experience with Service Mesh including Virtual Services, Destination Rules, Gateways, mTLS, Traffic routing, and Basic troubleshooting
• Experience with monitoring and observability including creating dashboards, alerting, metrics, performance troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and monitoring production services
• Strong technical documentation skills including producing clear Spike documentation, writing implementation documentation, maintaining comprehensive README files, producing operational runbooks, creating support documentation, producing handover documentation, recording technical decisions, and communicating ideas and proposals in a structured way
• Technical ownership including owning services throughout their lifecycle, understanding the wider platform, driving work forward with minimal supervision, identifying technical debt, challenging designs, considering operational support, designing maintainable solutions, working across multiple repositories and services, being accountable for quality, and supporting incident investigation
• Agile delivery experience including working effectively within Agile teams, participating in ceremonies, breaking down work, writing Jira stories, contributing to backlog refinement, providing estimates, collaborating with stakeholders, managing priorities, communicating progress, and promoting continuous improvement
• Leadership experience including supporting and mentoring engineers, providing technical direction, leading engineering discussions, making pragmatic decisions, reviewing designs and code, identifying opportunities for improvement, maintaining engineering standards, producing clear documentation, communicating technical ideas, working with stakeholders, influencing delivery, owning technical problems, and setting a high engineering standard

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Knowledge of identity platforms and authentication patterns
• Experience with Python and pytest
• Experience with Node.js
• Experience with Dynatrace

🎁 Benefits

By joining us you can expect:

• Autonomy to develop and grow your skills and experience
• Be part of exciting project work that is making a difference in society
• Strong, inspiring and thought-provoking leadership
• A supportive and collaborative environment.

As well as this, we offer:

• Development access to LinkedIn Learning, a management development programme and training
• Wellness 24/7 Confidential employee assistance programme
• Social – Breakfast Tuesdays, Thirsty Thursdays and Pizza on the last Thursday of each month as well as commitment to charitable causes
• Time off 25 days a year
• Pension Salary Exchange Scheme with 4% employer contribution and 5% employee contribution
• Discretionary Company Bonus based on company and individual performance
• Life Assurance of 4 times base salary
• Private Medical Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)
• Worldwide Travel Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role will require you to have or be willing to go through Security Clearance. As part of the onboarding process candidates will be asked to complete a Baseline Personnel Security Standard; details of the evidence required to apply may be found on the government website Gov.UK. If you are unable to meet this and any associated criteria, then your employment may be delayed, or rejected. Details of this will be discussed with you at interview.