DevOps Engineer

Project overview

Assignment Description

As a Senior DevOps Engineer Platforms, you are responsible for designing, building, and further developing a robust, scalable, and secure platform landscape within a complex organization such as Defense. You fulfill a leading role at the intersection of technology and business and make decisions based on both technical feasibility and business value. You take ownership of what you work on and align your choices (together) with your teammates, product owners, architects, and other stakeholders.

Thanks to your experience in stakeholder management within complex organizations, you know how to represent your own interests and those of the team towards stakeholders. You regularly act as a sparring partner and coach for the other colleagues in your team.

Designing, implementing, and managing improvements to Kubernetes-based platforms is something you are passionate about. You use your in-depth knowledge of (Open Source) CNCF applications, scaling, networking, RBAC, operators, and CRDs. You work according to GitOps principles and set up application and platform deployments with ArgoCD, including multi-environment setups, sync strategies, and rollback scenarios. You also have experience working in an on-premise environment and the peculiarities that come with it, not shying away from aspects like virtualization, storage, networking, and firewalls.

You professionally set up monitoring and observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and ELK/EFK, so that reliability and performance are continuously visible. You work according to SRE principles, apply reliability patterns, guide incident response, and facilitate blameless postmortems. Security is an integral part of your work: you apply security hardening in your code, orchestrate network policies, and know everything about secrets management.

You also have extensive experience with container image management (Docker/OCI), Linux troubleshooting, databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL (including operators and backups), and solving complex problems in distributed systems. You automate infrastructure and platform components with tools like Ansible and Helm and concepts like GitOps (ArgoCD). You also structurally embed these automations in Git and CI/CD pipelines. Finally, you actively contribute to knowledge sharing within the team, guide medior and junior engineers, and continuously work on improving the platform and yourself.

Background of the assignment

You will join the Service Team DATA, part of the DATA department within the Directorate Knowledge & Innovation of COMMIT. Here you will work with, among others, product owners, front-end developers, DevOps engineers, and administrators on future-oriented solutions for Defense. The Directorate Knowledge & Innovation (K&I) plays a key role within Defense: we ensure that our military personnel have access to the latest technologies in materiel and IT. By investing in knowledge building and innovation, we ensure that Defense can quickly respond to changes and technological developments.

In this way, we contribute to an organization that is agile and prepared for the challenges of tomorrow. Within the Service Team DATA, we specifically focus on developing and managing defense-wide data science platforms. We provide secure, well-managed environments and develop the tools and standards needed to enable advanced data applications. In this way, we support colleagues throughout the organization in building data-driven solutions.

In short, you will work in an environment where technology, innovation, and societal relevance come together - and where your expertise makes a difference for the security of the Netherlands.

Generic description competence area and levels

Follows predefined general practice standards performs planned necessary interventions to implement a solution, including installing, upgrading, or decommissioning. Configures hardware, software, or network to ensure interoperability of system components and debugs any resulting errors or incompatibilities. Uses additional specialized resources as needed, such as external network providers. Formally hands over the fully operational solution to the user and completes documentation that records all relevant information, including equipment addresses, configuration, and performance data.

Summary of task and mission

Implements processes and tools to successfully implement DevOps techniques throughout the development solution lifecycle. Applies a cross-functional, collaborative approach to creating customer-centric software solutions. Introduces automation throughout the software production system to deliver better software faster.

Responsibilities

Implement and manage continuous distribution methods

Design systems with a high degree of availability and scalability

Manage testing throughout the release lifecycle

Facilitate cross-functional collaboration and engagement

Design and manage process automation tools

Adopt an agile software development methodology

Manage continuous integration tool management

Requirements

eCF profile: Devops Expert

Reference Area: B.04 Implementing solutions

This assignment is based on the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF). This is a European standard for describing IT competencies and the corresponding level of responsibility. The eCF profile indicates which competencies and at what level (e-1 to e-5) are expected from the candidate. We expect candidates to clearly demonstrate in their CV that they possess these competencies. This can be done by describing for each relevant assignment or position:

CVs in which the required eCF competencies cannot be demonstrably found cannot be fully assessed for suitability.

Candidate has at least 3 years of demonstrable work experience with the chosen eCF profile similar role

Candidate preferably has demonstrable work experience with Open Source

Candidate preferably has demonstrable work experience with DevSecOps (DevOps)

Wishes

Candidate preferably has demonstrable work experience within the Ministry of Defense.

Additional Information

Hybrid working: Yes

Frequency of remote working days: Max 2 days

On-call services: No

• the role the candidate fulfilled
• the tasks and responsibilities involved
• the extent to which these align with the required eCF competencies and the level

Project details

• Start: 2026-10-29T23:00:00
• Location: Utrecht, NL
• Languages: Dutch