DV Application Support Engineer - Contract (outside of IR35)

Employment: Contract (outside of IR35)

Rate: £500 - £600 

Security Level: Must have live DV clearance  

Location: 5 days in either Cheltenham

About the role 

As part of our on-site team, you'll play a key role in designing, building, configuring, and maintaining resilient systems that support critical operations. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure our platforms are scalable, secure, and reliable, and directly with our intelligence community customers to deliver their mission. This involves analysing their requirements and configuring the cross-domain platform accordingly; and, with the rest of the team, resolving any issues and refining the setup together. 

 This is a hands-on role where you’ll have the opportunity to influence technical direction, improve system performance, and contribute directly to meaningful projects.  

Responsibilities 

We recognise that no one ticks every box. If your experience aligns with most of the below, we’d love to hear from you:  

• Designing and maintaining reliable, scalable physical and virtual infrastructure   
• Monitoring system performance and proactively resolving issues   
• Automating processes using tools such as Ansible to improve efficiency and consistency   
• Collaborating with engineers and stakeholders across the business   
• Supporting continuous improvement of systems, tools, and practices   
• Operating across the full infrastructure stack, from bare metal systems through to virtualised deployments and the applications running within them.  
• Understanding customers’ use cases, advising on the best components of the software system to use 
• Managing the lifecycle of customer integrations, retiring integrations when no longer required 
• Technical consultancy with customers on how to integrate with the system via REST APIs, SFTP, Web-hooks, etc 
• Second and third-line support, responding directly to business issues and questions.  
• Root cause analysis and proactive problem solving. The team is empowered to deploy changes in response to arising requirements.  

Key Skills 

• Candidate must have a live eDV clearance  
• A collaborative mindset and eager to learn 
• Communicating with technical and business stakeholders 
• Understanding of networking and software architectures 
• Understanding of structured text formats: JSON, XML, CSV 
• Understanding of synchronous and asynchronous architectures 
• Critical thinker with the ability to reason about problems, test hypotheses, and make appropriate risk decisions.  

Desirable Skills 

• Exposure to programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python, and Go 
• Familiarity with API definitions: Swagger / Open API 3  
• Familiarisation with shell scripting 
• Familiarisation with AWS or other cloud platforms’ administration 
• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or similar roles     
• Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible)   
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automation practices   
• Understanding of monitoring, logging, and alerting systems   
• Experience with Kubernetes – cloud or on-prem