Senior DevOps Engineer - AI Enablement (Ref: 23859)

We’re recruiting for multiple Senior DevOps Engineers here at Justice Digital, Data and Science, to be part of our warm and collaborative Hosting Platform Teams.

This role aligns against the Senior DevOps Engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

The Team: Justice Engineering AI Enablement is a new team focused on improving how engineers across the Ministry of Justice use artificial intelligence to design, build and operate digital services. Our aim is not simply to introduce new tools, but to establish the engineering capabilities, patterns and practices needed to use AI effectively, securely and at scale.

The team will build production services, developer tooling and reusable capabilities that make it easier for engineers to adopt AI without compromising the quality, security, reliability or maintainability of the services they build. Our work will cover areas such as AI-assisted software development, large language models, agents, model access, evaluation, observability, security controls and developer experience.

The work of the team has the potential to influence how hundreds of engineers across the Ministry of Justice work with AI. We will focus on creating approaches that can be reused across teams and services, rather than solving the same problems repeatedly in isolation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate production-grade services and tooling that enable engineers across the Ministry of Justice to make effective use of AI.
• Build developer tooling, integrations and reusable engineering patterns that reduce the friction involved in adopting AI within software delivery.
• Explore emerging AI capabilities and turn promising technologies into practical, secure and maintainable engineering solutions.
• Develop reference implementations, prototypes and proofs of concept to establish new engineering approaches, taking successful ideas through to production where appropriate.
• Help establish engineering patterns for working with large language models, including model access, tool use, agents, evaluation, observability, security and deployment.
• Work with AI platform and gateway capabilities, understanding how model gateways operate within a large enterprise and contributing to the integration of those capabilities into developer workflows.
• Design and implement approaches for safely executing AI agents and AI-generated workloads, considering areas such as filesystem access, network access, credentials, tool permissions, isolation, approvals and auditability.
• Build capabilities for evaluating and observing AI systems, enabling engineers to understand model behaviour, performance, cost and reliability.
• Help develop reusable approaches to AI security and governance, including guardrails, runtime controls and patterns that allow engineering teams to adopt AI without unnecessarily constraining innovation.
• Work across cloud platforms and AI providers, understanding the capabilities and trade-offs of different models, providers and deployment approaches.
• Stay abreast of developments in AI models, agentic systems, developer tooling and AI engineering, assessing where emerging capabilities could provide practical value to Ministry of Justice engineers.
• Work using modern software and platform engineering practices, including infrastructure as code, version control, continuous delivery and automated deployment.
• Develop and operate services across cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, using appropriate programming languages and technologies for the problem being solved.
• Work with container technologies and container orchestration as part of building, deploying and operating reliable production services.

Benefits

• A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
• 25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
• Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours. Designed to support a positive work–life balance.
• Employees are allocated 10% of their working time for personal and professional development.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best-in-class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!