Lead DevSecOps Engineer

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

The Survey Data Collection (SDC) service is responsible for the development, maintenance and continuous enhancement of the products that underpin high‑quality questionnaire design, survey delivery and online data collection across the platform.The service provides end‑to‑end technical and operational support across its product portfolio, meeting the needs of both internal and external users.

Job description

This Grade 7 Lead DevSecOps Engineer role will work closely with technical leads across SDC and will provide leadership and direction across the platform’s diverse and complex technical estate. The role will initially focus on a defined product area but may flex across the platform based on priorities. It requires strong knowledge and hands‑on experience of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments and services - including secure design, deployment and governance of workloads across GCP compute, networking, storage, IAM, and Cloud Security Command Center. The role also demands solid capability in Python for automation and tooling, alongside mastery of modern DevSecOps practices such as infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipeline design, security automation, policy enforcement, container orchestration, and continuous monitoring to ensure secure, scalable and resilient delivery across the platform.

Lead DevSecOps Engineers are responsible for shaping technical initiatives of high complexity or risk to ensure the successful, secure, and scalable design, build and run of cloud platforms using infrastructure as code.

Responsibilities

• Designing, configuring, and delivering applications and infrastructure as code to serve a variety of business process and user needs.
• Working in a DevSecOps environment to support and enhance existing applications and infrastructure including operational processes, including the implementation and use of monitoring, management information and reporting solutions.
• Ensuring best practice security principles such as ‘least privilege’ are continually adhered to and embedding ‘secure by design’ in all elements of your work; ensuring risks are identified and appropriate mitigation actions are implemented.
• Being a practitioner and advocate in the use of DevSecOps technologies, tools, and practices.
• Utilise knowledge of requirements including functional and others, such as performance, scalability, resilience, and security to support the robust implementation and optimisation of business applications, demonstrating system functionality and performance through testing.
• Using Agile ways of working to identify and manage development tools and test environments, centralise code / configuration, CI/CD pipelines, maintain development standards and enhance automation.
• Sharing knowledge of tools and techniques; identifying and sharing good practices and collaborating to improve the capability of the team and wider Organisation.
• Providing coaching and mentoring to colleagues, ensuring continual improvement for the team and the wider Organisation.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Programming and Build (Practitioner) - Collaborate with others when necessary to review specifications. Use the agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using the right standards and tools. You contribute to code reviews and give constructive feedback to others.
• Information Security (Expert) - Design, review and quality assure solutions and services, ensuring that they are specifically engineered to mitigate security threats. Lead others in using appropriate information security practices.
• Service Support (Expert) - Identify, locate and fix complex service faults. Advise others on different methodologies and types of service support.
• Availability and Capacity Management (Working) - You can: Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Community collaboration (practitioner) - Actively support and contribute to the community (for example, leading the development and implementation of community events, supporting cross-community work, community working group involvement). Advocate for and role model participation in the community, exemplifying the value of community collaboration.Advocate for and role model the sharing of knowledge and experience through mentoring, shadowing and coaching opportunities.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Managing a Quality Service
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Programming and build (Practitioner)
• Information Security (Expert)
• Service Support (Expert)
• Availability and capacity management (Working)

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £60,007, Office for National Statistics contributes

£17,384 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.

Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

I f you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

ONS are committed to flexible ways of working that support a healthy work-life balance. ONS has already considered how this job could be right sized for applicants working flexibly and we are happy to explore options with you about working part time, in a job share or flexibly, in line with our hybrid working policies.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window) , and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Security Clearance

For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying and the department will consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide this will result in your application being rejected.

If you are unsure that you meet the eligibility above, please read the information available on Gov.uk on this link or contact the recruitment email on the advert before applying to discuss, as failure to meet the residency requirements will result in your security clearance application being rejected and any offer of employment being withdrawn.

At the point of SC application, you will need to provide or give access to the following evidence:

• Departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
• UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
• Your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
• Security Services records

Please note we will reach out to you once the advert has closed to confirm eligibility for this role, this will be via an e-mail. Please check your junk e-mails for any correspondence.

Visa Sponsorship

ONS may be able to provide visa sponsorship where the role meets ONS sponsorship criteria and all relevant Home Office requirements. Applicants must hold, or be eligible to obtain, the right to work in the UK before employment commences.

Application Process

• Number of Stages: 2 stage process
• Stage 1: Application
• Stage 2: Interview
• Stage 1 – Application

The assessment process at the application stage will be based on your work history, CV, skills, experience, and personal statement . It is important that your application is tailored to highlight the skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to the role.

A personal statement is required at application stage, the maximum word count allowed is 1250 words , which should not be exceeded. You should provide evidence for each essential skill criterion listed in the person specification. As these criteria are scored, it is advisable to give clear examples for each one, including the impact of your actions, ideally utilising the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result).

Please note that Success Profiles Behaviour examples are not required at this stage of the application process.

In instances where a high number of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted, and candidates will be invited to interview based on merit order, i.e., those with the highest scores.

When a high volume of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted. Candidates will be invited to interview based on their merit order, with those achieving the highest scores being prioritised. Applicants who score below the adjusted pass mark but still pass will be placed on hold and may be invited to interview at a later date.

We often have similar roles available at different grades. If a candidate is suitable for a similar role or a lower grade than they have applied for, we may offer the candidate that role without the need to go through a further selection process providing the role has the same behaviours, and essential skills.

Stage 2 – Interview

If invited to interview, you will be assessed using techniques aligned with the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, covering all behaviours listed in the job advert and any required technical skills .

You will be required to provide a 7 minute presentation at interview. The presentation topic will be emailed to candidates who have passed the initial online application stage, 1 week prior to interview. This presentation will assess candidates against the Success Profiles Behaviour Changing and improving .

Interviews will be via Microsoft Teams.

Please note you will be asked to provide ID at the start of the interview.

A reserve list may be held for a period up to