Senior DevOps Engineer

Metrea | Defence

12h 23m ago

Hybrid

Full Time

United Kingdom

Title: Senior DevOps Engineer Location: London, England

Company Overview

Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas. These include airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special air missions, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation. We own the whole stack: designing, building, and operating turnkey capabilities that give our partners decisive, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.

Our operating model is built around three interlocking pillars. The Support Groups provide a global shared-service – spanning people, finance, platform, operations, legal, and engagement. This frees up our Core Groups, who develop and own mission capabilities end-to-end, to focus entirely on delivery. The Market Groups apply a regional lens, ensuring that our agile and adaptable capabilities remain aligned to the wicked problems that matter most to our partners across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

At the heart of our model is a simple but powerful idea: be a true partner with skin in the game. Our partners need effects, not just equipment. By owning the full stack – from the lab to the field – we are able to drive a continuous cycle of innovation that keeps our partners ahead. It's a fast-moving, intellectually demanding environment where talented people are given real responsibility, work on problems that matter, and contribute to an enterprise that is growing quickly and deliberately.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, with facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Group Overview

This role sits within Platform Group area of Metrea. The Platform Group rovides the Information Technology and Information Systems ecosystem that Metrea is utilising for the day-to-day operations, communication, collaboration and information sharing across its Platform business block.

Position Summary

In this role, you will lead the design and operation of secure, reliable Azure platforms that enable Metrea's UK teams to build, deploy, and support mission-focused services with confidence. You will shape how we use Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub, automation, and DevSecOps practices to improve delivery speed, platform resilience, and developer experience.

You will be successful if you can combine hands-on engineering depth with technical leadership: solving complex platform challenges, mentoring others, and making pragmatic decisions for sensitive defence environments.

What You'll Do

Design, implement and operate secure, scalable Azure platform services, primarily supporting MITO programmes and UK engineering teams.
Architect Azure infrastructure through code, covering networking, identity, compute, storage, monitoring, governance and container platforms.
Build and improve Azure DevOps and GitHub CI/CD pipelines for repeatable, controlled and secure software delivery.
Develop secure deployment patterns for AI-assisted and agentic workflows, including model integrations, automated evaluation and controlled releases.
Deploy and secure AI platform components such as model APIs, LLM workloads and MCP servers, with appropriate access controls, secrets management and data boundaries.
Build and optimise containerised workloads using Docker and AKS, with resilient and repeatable deployment patterns.
Implement DevSecOps practices including policy as code, vulnerability management, secrets management and software supply-chain controls.
Establish effective monitoring, logging, alerting and service-health reporting across platforms and workloads.
Troubleshoot complex infrastructure, networking, identity, security, pipeline and production issues affecting business-critical services.
Advise and mentor engineers, promote effective platform practices and help teams adopt reusable, self-service tooling.

What You Bring

Proven experience in a senior DevOps, platform, cloud or infrastructure engineering role supporting business-critical services.
Strong hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating Microsoft Azure environments.
Deep experience with Azure DevOps or GitHub, including CI/CD pipelines, release controls and deployment automation.
Proven infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates or comparable technologies.
Strong knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes and AKS, including resilient and automated deployment patterns.
Experience implementing DevSecOps controls across infrastructure, pipelines and the software supply chain.
Hands-on experience building AI-assisted or agentic development workflows, with exposure to model APIs, LLM deployments or MCP.
Strong troubleshooting capability across cloud infrastructure, networking, identity, observability and software delivery.
Ability to influence technical direction, mentor engineers and work effectively across software, platform, security and support teams.

Desirable Experience

Deploying or operating locally hosted LLMs or GPU-based model-serving infrastructure.
Securing MCP servers, agent permissions and access to sensitive tools or data.
Backstage or another internal developer platform, including reusable templates and self-service workflows.
Experience in defence, government or another regulated environment.

Additional Eligibility Qualifications

The successful candidate must be able to qualify for UK Security Clearance.

Benefits

Private Medical Insurance
Subsided gym membership / plans through Wellhub
Electric Car scheme
Cycle to work scheme
Salary sacrificed pension scheme
Free lunch on office days
Enhanced Parental Leave
30 days annual PTO plus b/h
Bonus Scheme
Personal development opportunities

Work Authorization / Security Clearance

The employee will have the legal right to work in the United Kingdom and will be able to produce right to work documentation.

AAP/EEO Statement

Metrea Management Limited (MAM) is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or other characteristics protected by law.

Position Type and Expected Hours of Work

This is a full-time non-exempt position with typical working hours of Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Hours and work shifts may change in accordance with department and business needs. Exempt Employees must have the ability to be on-call and available, as business needs require. Non-Exempt employees may be required to work over 40 hours per week with approval from the department manager.

Work Environment

This job operates in a hybrid work setting, with 3 days in the office.  The office is located at The Aircraft Factory, 100 Cambridge Grove, London, W6 0LE.

Travel

Some travel may be required to European/US destinations.

Our Firmware

At Metrea, our single core value is Rooted in Humility, and our four cornerstone attributes are Entrepreneurial, Systematic, Discerning, and Over-Deliver. These form what we call our Teammate Firmware. Just like technical firmware connects software and hardware, our Firmware is the constant interface between our mission and our people. It defines how we show up, how we work together, and how we solve complex problems.

Our team Firmware creates a web-like, hyper-collaborative, dynamically hierarchical way of working that helps us adapt quickly, communicate openly, and distribute decision-making to where expertise actually lives. It enables groups to self-organize around hard problems, shift fluidly as priorities evolve, and operate with the trust, curiosity, and discipline required in a complex mission space. This foundation allows us to deliver elegant, effective solutions and uphold our purpose: protecting our precious inheritance.

Required Skills

azureazure_devopsgithubterraformdockerkubernetes

Required Languages

🇬🇧 English