OPNET Design Office Automation Architect (SC Active)

Description:

Job Title: OPNET Design Office Automation Architect (SC Active)
Location: MoD Corsham
Working Model: Hybrid - 2 to 3 days on-site required
Duration: TBC
Daily Rate: Market Competitive
Outside IR35
SC Clearance required to be shortlisted for this role

Overview

The OpNET Design Office is responsible for the coherence and assurance of the design activity for the entirety of the OpNet Platform. This role reports directly to the Design Office Lead under governance of the System Design Authority and Core Product Owner. The primary focus of this role is to create, advise and assure OpNet designs for PAAS & Automation Architecture adoption. They must be conformant with vendor best practice, MoD security enforcement and the Defence Digital architectural patterns and guidance.

Key responsibilities: -

Support
Act as the point of contact for automation architecture and design on behalf of the Design Office Lead.
Interact with programme, project and engineering team leads to ensure cross team, cross technology coherence to satisfy the virtualisation requirements of the OpNet system.
Support design vision creation, design decisions and design review as part of the end to end assurance process.
Support to Programme and Project Stakeholder engagement and RAIDO
Liaise with external (to NSoIT(D)) stakeholders to ensure end-to-end designs are being delivered across the wider Defence landscape.
Liaise with team leads across the NSoIT(D) Programme and wider defence digital organisations to ensure a robust solution is delivered within Time, Cost and Performance.
Design
Identify, create and communicate HLDs across programme teams and the Design Office
Support the review of all high and low-level designs for coherence, technical content and quality.
Participate in Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews with stakeholders, both presenting and challenging design decisions, requirements alignment and supportability aspects.
Align standards, frameworks and security with overall business and technology strategy.
Support to the design of automation architecture elements to enable the system to function as part of the wider defence estate, during inception, transition and operations.
Assure
Ensuring that standards, frameworks and security postures align with overall business and technology strategies and policies.
Identify capability gaps in existing architectures and recommend changes or enhancements in line with Agile and continuous improvement methods.

Essential skills, qualifications, and experience

In order to deliver this service, it is essential that individuals have:

Automation and orchestration of secure software solutions with successful delivery on complex, large scale programmes utilising industry standard process and tooling where possible.
A deep understanding of DevSecOps and Infrastructure Automation Design principles and operating within a secure CI/CD environment, is crucial.
A deep understanding of declarative approaches using GitOps
Proven demonstrable experience and proficiency in designing and architecting complex systems , with a focus on automating platform deployments.
Strong experience in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with knowledge in common tooling such as Ansible, Terraform, etc.
Strong experience in Bare Metal Automation provisioning physical infrastructure
Defining and documenting technical requirements and producing detailed solution architectures.
Consulting and engineering in the development and design of automation best practices and implementation of solid security principles across the project to meet business goals along with customer and regulatory requirements.
Rationalising designs & their alignment against architectural best practice.
Demonstrable experience in the following:
In-depth understanding of TOGAF (v9 foundation certification minimum)
Familiarity with ArchiMate and other architectural tooling
Experience in integrating software solutions with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Experience in implementing solutions using container orchestration e.g. Docker Compose, Kubernetes, OpenShift (preference for experience delivering VMware Tanzu solutions)
Knowledge of security best practices and compliance standards related to VMware NSX environments.
Knowledge of CI/CD platforms and DevSecOps techniques and best practise
An understanding of Defence Lines of Development and MOD Capability Integration.
Comprehensive knowledge of UK Defence deployed architectures, federations with coalition partners, security enforcing gateways and modern techniques for enforcement of security principles including VPN, VDI, hardware encryption and information flow handling.
Experience in reviewing engineering designs and enhancing solutions against business requirements and Industry Best Practices.
Experience in delivering to a least privilege security model.
Must hold, or be willing to obtain SC clearance.
Hold a valid Security Clearance (SC)

Desirable skills, qualifications and experience

.NET Framework, Powershell, PowerCLI, Python, Angular and other languages and frameworks
Previous work in delivery of software-based programmes and projects
Automation and Orchestration technologies and principals
Security implementations such as PKI and proxy services in line with MOD Security assurance processes.
Delivering in Agile and Waterfall project management environments
Experience with the Atlassian Toolset - JIRA, Confluence and BitBucket for delivering Agile based projects.
Understanding of JSP and over-arching HMG policy.
A Computer Science university-based education at Bachelors or Masters level.
Experience leveraging LLM, AI and ML for optimisation of software deliveries and documentation creation
Experience in the implementation of standard infrastructure stacks such as Cisco, VMWare, Microsoft and Linux environments